s of Slavery, says, that by the laws of
Virginia, there are 'seventy-one crimes for which slaves are capitally
punished though in none of these are whites punished in manner more
severe than by imprisonment in the penitentiary.' (P. 107, where the
reader will find all the crimes enumerated.) It should be added,
however, that though the penalty for each of these seventy-one crimes
is 'death,' yet a majority of them are, in the words of the law,
'death within clergy;' and in Virginia, _clergyable_ offences, though
_technically_ capital, are not so in fact. In Mississippi, slaves are
punished capitally for more than _thirty_ crimes, for which whites are
punished only by fine or imprisonment, or both. Eight of these are not
_recognized as crimes_, either by common law or by statute, when
committed by whites. In South Carolina slaves are punished capitally
for _nine_ more crimes than the whites--in Georgia, for _six_--and in
Kentucky, for _seven_ more than whites, &c. We surely need not detain
the reader by comments on this monstrous inequality with which the
penal codes of slave states treat slaves and their masters. When we
consider that guilt is in proportion to intelligence, and that these
masters have by law doomed their slaves to ignorance, and then, as
they darkle and grope along their blind way, inflict penalties upon
them for a variety of acts regarded as praise worthy in whites;
killing them for crimes, when whites are only fined or imprisoned--to
call such a 'public opinion' inhuman, savage, murderous, diabolical,
would be to use tame words, if the English vocabulary could supply
others of more horrible import.

But slaveholding brutality does not stop here. While punishing the
slaves for crimes with vastly greater severity than it does their
masters for the same crimes, and making a variety of acts _crimes_ in
law, which are right, and often _duties_, it persists in refusing to
make known to the slaves that complicated and barbarous penal code
which loads them with such fearful liabilities. The slave is left to
get a knowledge of these laws as he can, and cases must be of constant
occurrence at the south, in which slaves get their first knowledge of
the existence of a law by suffering its penalty. Indeed, this is
probably the way in which they commonly learn what the laws are; for
how else can the slave get a knowledge of the laws? He cannot
_read_--he cannot _learn_ to read; if he try to master the alphabet,
so