him to kill,
to maim, or to punish beyond certain limits, or to overtask, or to
refuse to feed and clothe his slave. In short, they forbid him to be
tyrannical or cruel. If any of these laws have grown obsolete, it is
because they are so seldom violated, that they are forgotten. You have
disinterred one of them, from a compilation by some Judge Stroud of
Philadelphia, to stigmatize its inadequate penalties for killing,
maiming, etc. Your object appears to be--you can have no other--to
produce the impression, that it must be often violated on account of its
insufficiency. You say as much, and that it marks our estimate of the
slave. You forget to state that this law was enacted by _Englishmen_,
and only indicates _their_ opinion of the reparation due for these
offenses. Ours is proved by the fact, though perhaps unknown to Judge
Stroud or yourself, that we have essentially altered this law; and the
murder of a slave has for many years been punishable with death in this
State. And so it is, I believe, in most or all of the slave States. You
seem well aware, however, that laws have been recently passed in all
these States, making it penal to teach slaves to read. Do you know what
occasioned their passage, and renders their stringent enforcement
necessary? I can tell you. It was the abolition agitation. If the slave
is not allowed to read his Bible, the sin rests upon the abolitionists;
for they stand prepared to furnish him with a key to it, which would
make it, not a book of hope, and love, and peace, but of despair, hatred
and blood; which would convert the reader, not into a Christian, but a
demon. To preserve him from such a horrid destiny, it is a sacred duty
which we owe to our slaves, not less than to ourselves, to interpose the
most decisive means. If the Catholics deem it wrong to trust the Bible
to the hands of ignorance, shall we be excommunicated because we will
not give it, and with it the corrupt and fatal commentaries of the
abolitionists, to our slaves? Allow our slaves to read your writings,
stimulating them to cut our throats! Can you believe us to be such
unspeakable fools?

I do not know that I can subscribe in full to the sentiment so often
quoted by the abolitionists, and by Mr. Dickinson in his letter to me:
"_Homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto_," as translated and
practically illustrated by them. Such a doctrine would give wide
authority to every one for the most dangerous intermeddling with th