The masters were on their private score, however, prone to disregard the law where it restrained their own prerogatives.  They hired slaves to the slaves themselves whether legally permitted or not; they sent them on responsible errands to markets dozens of miles away, often without providing them with passes; they sanctioned and encouraged assemblies under conditions prohibited by law; they taught their slaves at will to read and write, and used them freely in forbidden employments.  Such practices as these were often noted and occasionally complained of in the press, but they were seldom obstructed.  When outside parties took legal steps to interfere in the master’s routine administration, indeed, they were prompted probably as often by personal animosity as by devotion to the law.  An episode of the sort, where the complainants were envious poorer neighbors, was related with sarcasm and some philosophical moralizing by W.B.  Hodgson, of whose plantation something has been previously said, in a letter to Senator Hammond:  “I am somewhat ‘riled’ with Burke.  The benevolent neighbors have lately had me in court under indictment for cruel treatment of my fat, lazy, rollicking sambos.  For fifty years they have eaten their own meat and massa’s too; but inasmuch as rich massa did not buy meat, the poor Benevolens indicted him.  So was my friend Thomas Foreman, executor of Governor Troup.  My suit was withdrawn; he was acquitted.  I have some crude notions about that thing slavery in the end.  Its tendency, as with landed accumulations in England, or Aaron’s rod, is to swallow up other small rods, and inevitably to attract the benevolence of the smaller ones.  You may have two thousand acres of land in a body.  That is unfeeling—­land is.  But a body of a thousand negroes appeals to the finer sentiments of the heart.  The agrarian battle is hard to fight.  But ‘les amis des noirs’ in our midst have the vantage ground, particularly when rejected overseers come in as spies. C’est un peu degoutant, mon cher ami; but I can stand the racket."[22]

[Footnote 22:  Letter of W.B.  Hodgson, Savannah, Ga., June 19, 1859, to J.H.  Hammond.  MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.  “Burke” is the county in which Hodgson’s plantation lay.]

The courts exercising jurisdiction over slaves were of two sorts, those of inferior grade and amateurish character which dealt with them as persons, and those of superior rank and genuine magisterial quality which handled them as property and sometimes, on appeal, as persons as well.  These lower courts for the trial of slave crimes had vices in plenty.  They were informal and largely ignorant of the law, and they were so quickly convened after the discovery of a crime that the shock of the deed had no time to wane.  Such virtues as they sometimes had lay merely in their personnel.  The slaveholders of the vicinage who commonly comprised the court were intimately and