lution seemed to be
taken to make me and Sayres, and even English, suffer in a way to be a
warning to all similar offenders.

The laws under which we were to be tried were those of the State of
Maryland as they stood previous to the year 1800. These laws had been
temporarily continued in force over that part of the District ceded by
Maryland (the whole of the present District) at the time that the
jurisdiction of the United Spates commenced; and questions of more
general interest, and the embarrassment growing out of the existence of
slavery, having defeated all attempts at a revised code, these same old
laws of Maryland still remain in force, though modified, in some
respects, by acts of Congress. In an act of Maryland, passed in the
year 1796, and in force in the District, there was a section which
seemed to have been intended for precisely such cases as ours. It
provided "That any person or persons who shall hereafter be convicted of
giving a pass to any slave, or person held to service, or shall be found
to assist, by advice, donation or loan, or otherwise, the transporting
of any slave or any person held to service, from this state, or by any
other unlawful means depriving a master or owner of the service of his
slave or person held to service, for every such offence the party
aggrieved shall recover damages in an action on the case, against such
offender or offenders, and such offender or offenders shall also be
liable, upon indictment, and conviction upon verdict, confession or
otherwise, in this state, in any county court where such offence shall
happen, to be fined a sum not exceeding two hundred dollars, at the
discretion of the court, one-half to the use of the master or owner of
such slave, the other half to the county school, if there be any; if
there be no such school, to the use of the county."

Accordingly, the grand jury, under the instructions of the District
Attorney, found seventy-four indictments against each of us prisoners,
based on this act, one for each of the slaves found on board the vessel,
two excepted, who were runaways from Virginia, and the names of their
masters not known. As it would have been possible to have fined us
about, fifteen thousand dollars apiece upon these indictments, besides
costs, and as, by the laws of the District, there is no method of
discharging prisoners from jail who are unable to pay a fine, except by
an executive pardon, one would have thought that this might ha