ligula
merely hung his laws so high that they could not be _read_--our
slaveholders have hung theirs so high above the slave that they cannot
be _seen_--they are utterly out of sight, and he finds out that they
are there only by the falling of the penalties on his head.[35] Thus
the "public opinion" of slave states protects the defenceless slave by
arming a host of legal penalties and setting them in ambush at every
thicket along his path, to spring upon him unawares.

[Footnote 35: The following extract from the Alexandria (D.C.) Gazette
is all illustration. "CRIMINALS CONDEMNED.--On Monday last the Court
of the borough of Norfolk, Va. sat on the trial of four negro boys
arraigned for burglary. The first indictment charged them with
breaking into the hardware store of Mr. E.P. Tabb, upon which two of
them were found guilty by the Court, and condemned to suffer the
penalty of the law, which, in the case of a slave, is death. The
second Friday in April is appointed for the execution of their awful
sentence. _Their ages do not exceed sixteen_. The first, a fine active
boy, belongs to a widow lady in Alexandria; the latter, a house
servant, is owned by a gentleman in the borough. The value of one was
fixed at $1000, and the other at $800; which sums are to be
re-imbursed to their respective owners out of the state treasury." In
all probability these poor boys, who are to be hung for stealing,
never dreamed that death was the legal penalty of the crime.

Here is another, from the "New Orleans Bee" of ---- 14, 1837--"The
slave who STRUCK some citizens in Canal street, some weeks since, has
been tried and found guilty, and is sentenced to be HUNG on the 24th."]

Stroud, in his Sketch of the Laws of Slavery, page 100, thus comments
on this monstrous barbarity.

"The hardened convict moves their sympathy, and is to be taught the
laws before he is expected to obey them;[36] yet the guiltless slave
is subjected to an extensive system of cruel enactments, of no part of
which, probably, has he ever heard."

[Footnote 36: "It shall be the duty of the keeper [of the penitentiary]
on the receipt of each prisoner, to _read_ to him or her such parts of
the penal laws of this state as impose penalties for escape, and to
make all the prisoners in the penitentiary acquainted with the same.
It shall also be his duty, on the discharge of such prisoner, to read
to him or her such parts of the laws as impose additional punishments
for