oomed 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 that he may spell out the words of the law, and thus avoid its
penalties, the law shakes its terrors at him; while, at the same time,
those who made the laws refuse to make them known to those for whom
they are designed. The memory of Caligula will blacken with execration
while time lasts, because be hung up his laws so high that people
could not read them, and then punished them because they did not keep
them. Our slaveholders aspire to blacker infamy. Caligula was content
with hanging up his laws where his subjects could _see_ them; and if
they could not read them, they knew where they were, and might get at
them, if, in their zeal to learn his will, they had used the same
means to get up to them that those did who hung them there. Even
Caligula, wretch as he was, would have shuddered at cutting their legs
off, to prevent their climbing to them; or, if they had got there, at
boring their eyes out, to prevent their reading them. Our slaveholders
virtually do both; for they prohibit their slaves acquiring that
knowledge of letters which would enable them to read the laws; and if,
by stealth, they get it in spite of them, they prohibit them books and
papers, and flog them if they are caught at them. Further--Ca