Slavery and the Constitution

[O] (#FNanchor_O_15) Colored persons are not competent witnesses on the trial of a white man. Any white man, therefore, can, with perfect impunity, commit any excess whatever upon any slaves, so long as they or their companions alone are witnesses. So carefully does the law guard the honor of the female slave!

[P] (#FNanchor_P_16) The original of this advertisement may be seen at the Anti-Slavery office, Boston, 21, Cornhill, pasted on one side of a copy of the newspaper called "Spirit of Liberty"! How appropriate a heading!

[Q] (#FNanchor_Q_17) For this and other advertisements from Boston papers, I am indebted to my friend Wendell Phillips.

[R] (#FNanchor_R_18) We cut this advertisement from the "Boston Daily Republican" of Aug. 30, 1849. It previously appeared in the "Providence Journal."

[S] (#FNanchor_S_19) A writer in the "New Orleans Argus," Sept. 1830, in an article on the culture of the sugar-cane, says, – "The loss by death in bringing slaves from a northern climate, which our planters are under the necessity of doing, is not less than twenty-five per cent"! Our tables prove the same thing. Of the 40,000 slaves annually carried south, only 29,101 are found to survive; – a greater sacrifice of life than that caused by the middle passage!

[T] (#FNanchor_T_20) The Act of 1741, of which this law is in part a revision, reads thus, sec. 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 ways or means as he or she shall think fit, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for the same." – In those happy days, Father Taylor would not have been called on to thank God, that the man who was on the point of strangling his brother according to law was not troubled by any feeling of sentimentalism!

[U] (#FNanchor_U_21) The Rev. Dr. Furman, of North Carolina, another Baptist clergyman, like Dr. Fuller wrote a defence of slavery. After his death, his legal representative advertised for sale at auction his real estate, and "a library of a miscellaneous character, chiefly theological; twenty-seven negroes, some of them very prime," &c. ("The Church as it is," p. 73.)

[V] (#FNanchor_V_22) This point, and the legality of Colonial and State Slavery, are more elaborated in an article called "The Constitutionality of Slavery," printed in the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review;" a purely legal, uninteresting examination, which needs not to be repeated here.

For a more extended proof of the constitutionality of slavery, we refer to Wendell Phillips's very able Review of Lysander Spooner's Essay.

[W] (#FNanchor_W_23) 5 Hen. Stat. 547.

[X] (#FNanchor_W_23) 6 Ibid. 356.