regarded by them as an
article of property, and held, and bought and sold as such, in every one
of the thirteen colonies which united in the Declaration of
Independence, and afterward formed the Constitution of the United
States. The slaves were more or less numerous in the different colonies,
as slave labor was found more or less profitable. But no one seems to
have doubted the correctness of the prevailing opinion of the time.

The legislation of the different colonies furnishes positive and
indisputable proof of this fact.

It would be tedious, in this opinion, to enumerate the various laws they
passed upon this subject. It will be sufficient, as a sample of the
legislation which then generally prevailed throughout the British
colonies, to give the laws of two of them; one being still a large
slaveholding State, and the other the first State in which slavery
ceased to exist.

The province of Maryland, in 1717, (chap, xiii, s. 5,) passed a law
declaring "that if any free negro or mulatto intermarry with any white
woman, or if any white man shall intermarry with any negro or mulatto
woman, such negro or mulatto shall become a slave during life, excepting
mulattoes born of white women, who, for such intermarriage, shall only
become servants for seven years, to be disposed of as the justices of
the county court, where such marriage so happens, shall think fit; to be
applied by them toward the support of a public school within the said
county. And any white man or white woman who shall intermarry as
aforesaid, with any negro or mulatto, such white man or white woman
shall become servants during the term of seven years, and shall be
disposed of by the justices as aforesaid, and be applied to the uses
aforesaid."

The other colonial law to which we refer was passed by Massachusetts in
1705, (chap, vi.) It is entitled "An act for the better preventing of a
spurious and mixed issue," etc.; and it provides, that "if any negro or
mulatto shall presume to smite or strike any person of the English or
other Christian nation, such negro or mulatto shall be severely whipped,
at the discretion of the justices before whom the offender shall be
convicted."

And "that none of her Majesty's English or Scottish subjects, nor of any
other Christian nation, within this province, shall contract matrimony
with any negro or mulatto; nor shall any person, duly authorized to
solemnize marriage, presume to join any such in marriage, on pain