of court approval; and slaves employed by their masters in tutorial capacity were declared ipso facto free.  In police regards, the travel and assemblage of slaves were restrained, and no one was allowed to trade with them without their masters’ leave; slaves were forbidden to have weapons except when commissioned by their masters to hunt; fugitives were made liable to severe punishments, and free negroes likewise for harboring them.  Negroes whether slave or free, however, were to be tried by the same courts and by the same procedure as white persons; and though masters were authorized to apply shackles and lashes for disciplinary purpose, the killing of slaves by them was declared criminal even to the degree of murder.[5]

[Footnote 5:  This decree is printed in Le Code Noir (Paris, 1742), pp. 318-358, and in the Louisiana Historical Society Collections, IV, 75-90.  The prior decree of 1685 establishing a slave code for the French West Indies, upon which this for Louisiana was modeled, may be consulted in L. Peytraud, L’Esclavage aux Antilles Francaises (Paris, 1897), pp. 158-166.]

Nearly all the provisions of this relatively liberal code were adopted afresh when Louisiana became a territory and then a state of the Union.  In assimilation to Anglo-American practice, however, such recognition as had been given to slave peculium was now withdrawn, though on the other hand slaves were granted by implication a legal power to enter contracts for self-purchase.  Slave marriages, furthermore, were declared void of all civil effect; and jurisdiction over slave crimes was transferred to courts of inferior grade and informal procedure.  By way of reciprocation the state of Alabama when framing a new slave code in 1852 borrowed in a weakened form the Louisiana prohibition of the separate sale of mothers and their children below ten years of age.  This provision met the praise of citizens elsewhere when mention of it chanced to be published; but no other commonwealth appears to have adopted it.[6]

[Footnote 6:  E. g., Atlanta Intelligencer, Feb. 27, 1856.]

The severity of the slave laws in the commonwealths of English origin, as compared with the mildness of the Louisiana code, was largely due to the historic possession by their citizens of the power of local self-government.  A distant autocrat might calmly decree such regulations as his ministers deemed proper, undisturbed by the wishes and apprehensions of the colonial whites; but assemblymen locally elected and responsive to the fears as well as the hopes of their constituents necessarily reflected more fully the desire of social control, and preferred to err on the side of safety.  If this should involve severity of legislative repression for the blacks, that might be thought regrettable and yet be done without a moment’s qualm.  On the eve of the American Revolution a West Indian writer explained the regime.  “Self