Act 1717, Chap. 13, Sec. 5--Provides that any free colored person

marrying a slave, becomes a slave for life, except mulattoes born of white women.

DELAWARE.--_Laws._--More than six men slaves, meeting together, not belonging to one master, unless on lawful business of their owners, may be whipped to the extent of twenty-one lashes each.--p. 104.

UNITED STATES.--_Constitution._--The chief pro-slavery provisions of the constitution, as is generally known, are, 1st, that by virtue of which the slave states are represented in congress for three-fifths of their slaves;[7] 2nd, that requiring the giving up of any runaway slaves to their masters; 3rd, that pledging the physical force of the whole country to suppress insurrections, i. e., attempts to gain freedom by such means as the framers of the instrument themselves used.

Act of Feb. 12, 1793--Provides that any master or his agent may seize any person whom he claims as a "fugitive from service," and take him before a judge of the U. S. court, or magistrate of the city or county where he is taken, and the magistrate, on proof, in support of the claim, to his satisfaction, must give the claimant a certificate authorizing the removal of such fugitive to the state he fled from.[8]

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.--The act of congress incorporating Washington city, gives the corporation power to prescribe the terms and conditions on which free negroes and mulattoes may reside in the city. _City Laws_, 6 and 11. By this authority, the city in 1827 enacted that any free colored person coming there to reside, should give the mayor satisfactory evidence of his freedom, and enter into bond with two freehold sureties, in the sum of five hundred dollars, for his good conduct, to be renewed each year for three years; or failing to do so, must leave the city, or be committed to the workhouse, for not more than one year, and if he still refuse to go, may be again committed for the same period, and so on.--_Ib._ 198.

Colored persons residing in the city, who cannot prove their title to freedom, shall be imprisoned as absconding slaves.--_Ib._ 198.

Colored persons found without free papers may be arrested as runaway slaves, and after two months' notice, if no claimant appears, must be advertised ten days, and sold to pay their jail fees.[9]--_Stroud_, 85, note.

The city of Washington grants a license to _trade in slaves_, for profit, as agent, or otherwise, for four hundred dollars.--_City Laws_, p. 249.

Reader, you uphold these laws _while you do nothing for their repeal_. You _can do_ much. You can take and read the anti-slavery journals. They will give you an impartial history of the cause, and arguments with which to convert its enemies. You can countenance and aid those who are laboring for its promotion. You can petition against slavery; you can refuse to vote for slaveholders or pro-slavery men, constitutions and compacts; can abstain from products of slave labor; and can use your social influence to spread right principles and awaken a right feeling. Be as earnest for freedom as its foes are for slavery, and you can diffuse an anti-slavery sentiment through your whole neighborhood, and merit "the blessing of them that are ready to perish."

The following is from the old colonial law of North Carolina:

Notice of the commitment of runaways--viz., 1741, c. 24, § 29. "An act concerning servants and slaves."

Copy of notice containing a full description of such runaway and his clothing.--The sheriff is to "cause a copy of such notice to be sent to the clerk or reader of each church or chapel within his county, who are hereby required to make publication thereof by setting up the same in some open and convenient place, near the said church or chapel, on every Lord's day, during the space of two months from the date thereof."

1741, c. 24, § 45.--"Which proclamation shall be published on a Sabbath day at the door of every church or chapel, or, for want of such, at the place where divine service shall be performed in the said county, by the parish clerk or reader, immediately after divine service; and if any slave or slaves, against whom proclamation hath been thus issued, stay out and do not immediately return home, it shall be lawful for any person or persons whatsoever to kill and destroy such slave or slaves by such way or means as he or she shall think fit, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for the same."

It is well known that slavery makes labor disreputable in the slave states. Laboring men of the north, hear how contemptibly slaveholders speak of you.

Mr. Robert Wickliffe of Kentucky, in a speech published in the Louisville Advertiser, in opposition to those who were averse to the importation of slaves from the states, thus discourseth:

"Gentlemen wanted to drive out the black population that they may obtain WHITE NEGROES in their place. WHITE NEGROES have this advantage over black negroes, they can be converted into voters; and the men who live upon the sweat of their brow, and pay them but a dependent and scanty subsistence, can, if able to keep ten thousand of them in employment, come up to the polls and change the destiny of the country.

"How improved will be our condition when we have such white negroes as perform the servile labors of Europe, of old England, and he would add now of _New England_, when our body servants and our cart drivers, and our street sweepers, are _white negroes_ instead of black. Where will be the independence, the proud spirit, and chivalry of the Kentuckians then?"

"We believe the servitude which prevails in the south far preferable to that of the _north_, or in Europe. Slavery will exist in all communities. There is a class which may be nominally free, but they will be virtually _slaves_."--_Mississippian, July 6th, 1838._

"Those who depend on their daily labor for their daily subsistence can never enter into political affairs, they never do, never will, never can."--_B. W. Leigh in Virginia Convention, 1829._

"All society settles down into a classification of capitalists and laborers. The former will _own_ the latter, either collectively through the government, or individually in a state of domestic servitude as exists in the southern states of this confederacy. If LABORERS ever obtain the political power of a country, it is in fact in a state of REVOLUTION. The capitalists north of Mason and Dixon's line have precisely the same interest in the labor of the country that the capitalists of England have in their labor. Hence it is, that they must have a strong federal government (!) _to control_ the labor of the nation. But it is precisely the reverse with us. We have already not only a right to the proceeds of our laborers, but we OWN a _class of laborers_ themselves. But let me say to gentlemen who represent the great class of capitalists in the north, beware that you do not drive us into a separate system, for if you do, as certain as the decrees of heaven, you will be compelled to _appeal to the sword to maintain yourselves at home_. It may not come in your day; but your children's children will be covered with the blood of domestic factions, and _a plundering mob contending for power and conquest_."--_Mr. Pickens, of South Carolina, in Congress, 21st Jan., 1836._

"In the very nature of things there must be classes of persons to discharge all the different offices of society from the highest to the lowest. Some of these offices are regarded as _degraded_, although they must and will be performed. Hence those manifest forms of dependent servitude which produce a sense of superiority in the masters or employers, and of inferiority on the part of the servants. Where these offices are performed by _members of the political community_, a DANGEROUS ELEMENT is obviously introduced into the body politic. Hence the alarming tendency to violate the rights of property by agrarian legislation which is beginning to be manifest in the older states where UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE _prevails without_ DOMESTIC SLAVERY.

"In a word, the institution of domestic slavery supersedes the _necessity_ of AN ORDER OF NOBILITY AND ALL THE OTHER APPENDAGES OF A HEREDITARY SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT."--_Gov. M'Duffie's Message to the South Carolina Legislature, 1836._

"We of the south have cause now, and shall soon have greater, to congratulate ourselves on the existence of a population among us which excludes the POPULACE which in effect rules some of our northern neighbors, and is rapidly gaining strength wherever slavery does not exist--a populace made up of the dregs of Europe, and the most worthless portion of the native population."--_Richmond Whig, 1837._

"Would you do a benefit to the horse or the ox by giving him a cultivated understanding, a fine feeling! So far as the MERE LABORER has the pride, the knowledge or the aspiration of a freeman, he is unfitted for his situation. If there are sordid, servile, _laborious_ offices to be performed, is it not better that there should be sordid, servile, laborious beings to perform them?

"Odium has been cast upon our legislation on account of its forbidding the elements of education being communicated to slaves. But in truth what injury is done them by this? _He who works during the day with his hands_, does not read in the intervals of leisure for his amusement or the improvement of his mind, or the exception is so very rare as scarcely to need the being provided for."--_Chancellor Harper, of South Carolina._--_Southern Lit. Messenger._

"Our slave population is decidedly preferable, as an orderly and laboring class, to a northern laboring class, that have just learning enough to make them wondrous wise, and make them the most dangerous class to well regulated liberty under the sun."--_Richmond (Virginia) Enquirer._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In accordance with this doctrine, an act of Maryland, 1798, enumerates among articles of property, "_slaves, working beasts, animals of any kind, stock, furniture, plate, and so forth_."--_Ib._ 23.

[2] A slave is not admonished for incontinence, punished for adultery, nor prosecuted for bigamy.--_Attorney General of Maryland, Md. Rep. Vol. I._ 561.

[3] The legal meaning of assault is to _offer_ to do personal violence.

[4] A court for the trial of slaves consists of one justice of the peace, and three freeholders, and the justice and one freeholder, i. e., _one half the court, may convict, though the other two are for acquittal_.--_Martin's Dig., I._ 646.

[5] A slave may be out-lawed when he runs away, conceals himself, and, to sustain life, kills a hog, or any animal of the cattle kind.--_Haywood's Manual_, p. 521.

[6] In South Carolina, _any_ person may seize such freed man and keep him as his property.

[7] By the operation of this provision, twelve slaveholding states, whose white population only equals that of New York and Ohio, send to congress 24 senators and 102 representatives, while these two states only send 4 senators and 59 representatives.

[8] Thus it may be seen that a _man_ may be doomed to slavery by an authority not considered sufficient to settle a claim of _twenty dollars_.

[9] The prisons of the district, built with the money of the nation, are used as store-houses of the slaveholder's human merchandize. "From the statement of the keeper of a jail at Washington, it appears that in five years, upwards of 450 colored persons were committed to the national prison in that city, for safekeeping, i. e., until they could be disposed of in the course of the _slave trade_, besides nearly 300 who had been taken up as runaways."--_Miner's Speech in H. Rep._, 1829.