various regards, that of petit treason, for example, from this avenue of relief.  On the other hand many American slaves were saved from death at the hands of the law by the tolerant spirit of citizens toward them and by the consideration of the pecuniary loss to be suffered through their execution.  A Jamaican statute of 1684 went so far as to prescribe that when several slaves were jointly involved in a capital crime one only was to be executed as an example and the loss caused by his death was to be apportioned among the owners of the several.[11] More commonly the mitigation lay not in the laws themselves but in the general disposition to leave to the discipline of the masters such slave misdeeds as were not regarded as particularly heinous nor menacing to the public security.

[Footnote 9:  A.C.  Goodell, Jr., The Trial and Execution for Petit Treason of Mark and Phillis (Cambridge, 1883), reprinted from the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, XX, 132-157.]

[Footnote 10:  A.L.  Cross, “Benefit of Clergy,” in the American Historical Review, XXII, 544-565.]

[Footnote 11:  Abridgement of the Laws in Force in Her Majesty’s Plantations (London, 1704), pp. 104-108.]

Burnings at the stake, breakings on the wheel and other ferocious methods of execution which were occasionally inflicted by the colonial courts were almost universally discontinued soon after the beginning of the nineteenth century.  The general trend of moderation discernible at that time, however, was hampered then and thereafter by the series of untoward events beginning with the San Domingo upheaval and ending with John Brown’s raid.  In particular the rise of the Garrisonian agitation and the quickly ensuing Nat Turner’s revolt occasioned together a wave of reactionary legislation the whole South over, prohibiting the literary instruction of negroes, stiffening the patrol system, restricting manumissions, and diminishing the already limited liberties of free negroes.  The temper of administration, however, was not appreciably affected, for this clearly appears to have grown milder as the decades passed.

The police ordinances of the several cities and other local jurisdictions were in keeping with the state laws which they supplemented and in some degree duplicated.  At New Orleans an ordinance adopted in 1817 and little changed thereafter forbade slaves to live off their masters’ premises without written permission, to make any clamorous noise, to show disrespect to any white persons, to walk with canes on the streets unless on account of infirmity, or to congregate except at church, at funerals, and at such dances and other amusements as were permitted for them on Sundays alone and in public places.  Each offender was to be tried by the mayor or a justice of the peace after due notice to his master, and upon conviction was to be punished within a limit of twenty-five lashes unless his master paid a fine for him instead.[12]