restricted; any property they might acquire was considered as belonging to their masters; their marriages were without legal recognition; and although the wilful killing of slaves was generally held to be murder, the violation of their women was without criminal penalty.  Under the law as it generally stood no slave might raise his hand against a white person even in self-defense unless his life or limb were endangered, nor might he in his own person apply to the courts for the redress of injuries, nor generally give evidence except where negroes alone were involved.  All white persons on the other hand were permitted, and in some regards required, to exercise police power over the slaves; and their masters in particular were vested with full disciplinary power over them in all routine concerns.  If they should flee from their masters’ dominion, the force of the state and of other states into which they might escape, and of the United States if necessary, might be employed for their capture and resubjection; and any suspected of being fugitives, though professing to be free, might be held for long periods in custody and in the end, in default of proofs of freedom and of masters’ claims, be sold by the authorities at public auction.  Finally, affecting slaves and colored freemen somewhat alike, and regardless as usual of any distinction of mulattoes or quadroons from the full-blood negroes, there were manifold restraints of a social character buttressing the predominance and the distinctive privileges of the Caucasian caste.

[Footnote 16:  E. g., Jones, North Carolina Supreme Court Reports, VI. 272.]

It may fairly be said that these laws for the securing of slave property and the police of the colored population were as thorough and stringent as their framers could make them, and that they left an almost irreducible minimum of rights and privileges to those whose function and place were declared to be service and subordination.  But in fairness it must also be said that in adopting this legislation the Southern community largely belied itself, for whereas the laws were systematically drastic the citizens in whose interest they were made and in whose hands their enforcement lay were in practice quite otherwise.  It would have required a European bureaucracy to keep such laws fully effective; the individualistic South was incapable of the task.  If the regulations were seldom relaxed in the letter they were as rarely enforced in the spirit.  The citizens were too fond of their own liberties to serve willingly as martinets in the routine administration of their own laws;[17] and in consequence the marchings of the patrol squads were almost as futile and farcical as the musters of the militia.  The magistrates and constables tended toward a similar slackness;[18] while on the other hand the masters, easy-going as they might be in other concerns, were jealous of any infringements of their own dominion or any abuse of