N.C. Rep._ 263; and _"Law
of Slavery," _247;) in which the defendant was charged with shooting a
slave girl 'belonging' to the plaintiff; the Supreme Court of North
Carolina, in their decision, speaking of the provocations of the
master by the slave, and 'the consequent wrath of the master'
prompting him to _bloody vengeance_, add, _'a vengeance generally
practised with impunity, by reason of its privacy.'_

Laws excluding the testimony of slaves and free colored persons, where
a white is concerned, do not exist in all the slave states. One or two
of them have no legal enactment on the subject; but, in those,
_'public opinion'_ acts with the force of law, and the courts
_invariably reject it_. This brings us back to the potency of that
oft-quoted 'public opinion,' so ready, according to our objector, to
do battle for the _protection_ of the slave!

Another proof that 'public opinion,' in the slave states, plunders,
tortures, and murders the slaves, instead of _protecting_ them, is
found in the fact, that the laws of slave states inflict _capital_
punishment on slaves for a variety of crimes, for which, if their
masters commit them, the legal penalty is merely _imprisonment_. Judge
Stroud in his Sketch of the Laws 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 d