preservation,” said he, “that first and ruling principle of human nature, alarming our fears, has made us jealous and perhaps severe in our threats against delinquents.  Besides, if we attend to the history of our penal laws relating to slaves, I believe we shall generally find that they took their rise from some very atrocious attempts made by the negroes on the property of their masters or after some insurrection or commotion which struck at the very being of the colonies.  Under these circumstances it may very justly be supposed that our legislatures when convened were a good deal inflamed, and might be induced for the preservation of their persons and properties to pass severe laws which they might hold over their heads to terrify and restrain them."[7] In the next generation an American citizen wrote in similar strain and with like truthfulness:  “The laws of the slaveholding states do not furnish a criterion for the character of their present white population or the condition of the slaves.  Those laws were enacted for the most part in seasons of particular alarm produced by attempts at insurrection, or when the black inhabitants were doubly formidable by reason of the greater proportion which they bore to the whites in number and the savage state and unhappy mood in which they arrived from Africa.  The real measure of danger was not understood but after long experience, and in the interval the precautions taken were naturally of the most jealous and rigorous aspect.  That these have not all been repealed, or that some of them should be still enforced, is not inconsistent with an improved spirit of legislation, since the evils against which they were intended to guard are yet the subject of just apprehension."[8]

[Footnote 7:  Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture, or a Defence of the West India Planters.  By a West Indian (Philadelphia, 1773), p. 18, note.]

[Footnote 8:  Robert Walsh, Jr., An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain respecting the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1819), p. 405.]

Wherever colonial statutes were silent the laws of the mother country filled the gap.  It was under the common law of England, for example, that the slaves Mark and Phillis were tried in Massachusetts in 1755 for the poisoning of their master, duly convicted of petit treason, and executed—­the woman as the principal in the crime by being burned at the stake, the man as an accessory by being hanged and his body thereafter left for years hanging in chains on Charlestown common.[9] The severity of Anglo-American legislation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, furthermore, was in full accord with the tone of contemporary English criminal law.  It is not clear, however, that the great mitigation which benefit of clergy gave in English criminal administration[10] was commensurately applied in the colonies when slave crimes were concerned.  Even in England, indeed, servants were debarred in