[Footnote 89:  [Edwin C. Holland], A Refutation of the Calumnies circulated against the Southern and Western States respecting the institution and existence of Slavery among them.  By a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1822), pp. 84, 85.]

[Footnote 90:  E.R.  Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania, p. 158.]

[Footnote 91:  Letter to the editor in the Louisiana Gazette, Aug. 12, 1819.]

CHAPTER XXII

SLAVE CRIME

The negroes were in a strange land, coercively subjected to laws and customs far different from those of their ancestral country; and by being enslaved and set off into a separate lowly caste they were largely deprived of that incentive to conformity which under normal conditions the hope of individual advancement so strongly gives.  It was quite to be expected that their conduct in general would be widely different from that of the whites who were citizens and proprietors.  The natural amenability of the blacks, however, had been a decisive factor in their initial enslavement, and the reckoning which their captors and rulers made of this was on the whole well founded.  Their lawbreaking had few distinctive characteristics, and gave no special concern to the public except as regards rape and revolt.

Records of offenses by slaves are scant because on the one hand they were commonly tried by somewhat informal courts whose records are scattered and often lost, and on the other hand they were generally given sentences of whipping, death or deportation, which kept their names out of the penitentiary lists.  One errs, however, in assuming a dearth of serious infractions on their part and explaining it by saying, “under a strict slave regime there can scarcely be such a thing as crime";[1] for investigation reveals crime in abundance.  A fairly typical record in the premises is that of Baldwin County, Georgia, in which the following trials of slaves for felonies between 1812 and 1832 are recounted:  in 1812 Major was convicted of rape and sentenced to be hanged.  In 1815 Fannie Micklejohn, charged with the murder of an infant was acquitted; and Tom, convicted of murdering a fellow slave was sentenced to branding on each cheek with the letter M and to thirty-nine lashes on his bare back on each of three successive days, after which he was to be discharged.  In 1816 John, a slave of William McGeehee, convicted of the theft of a $100 bill was sentenced to whipping in similar fashion.  In 1818 Aleck was found guilty of an assault with intent to murder, and received sentence of fifty lashes on three days in succession.  In 1819 Rodney was capitally sentenced for arson.  In 1821 Peter, charged with murdering a slave, was convicted of manslaughter and ordered to be branded with M on the right cheek and to be given the customary three times thirty-nine lashes; and Edmund, charged with involuntary manslaughter, was dismissed on the