Page:A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853).djvu/137

 teach the dog to wait and bark under the tree till you come up and give him his meat.

See also the following advertisement from the Ouachita Register, a newspaper dated "Monroe, La., Tuesday evening, June 1, 1852."

The undersigned would respectfully inform the citizens of Ouachita and adjacent parishes, that he has located about 2 miles east of John White's, on the road leading from Monroe to Bastrop, and that he has a fine pack of Dogs for catching negroes. Persons wishing negroes caught will do well to give him a call. He can always be found at his stand when not engaged in hunting, and even then information of his whereabouts can always be had of some one on the premises.

Terms.—Five dollars per day and found, when there is no track pointed out. When the track is shown, twenty-five dollars will be charged for catching the negro.

Monroe, Feb. 17, 1852.

Now, do not all the scenes likely to be enacted under this head form a fine education for the children of a Christian nation? and can we wonder if children so formed see no cruelty in slavery? Can children realize that creatures who are thus hunted are the children of one heavenly Father with themselves?

But suppose the boy grows up to be a man, and attends the courts of justice, and hears intelligent, learned men declaring from the bench that "the mere beating of a slave, unaccompanied by any circumstances of cruelty, or an attempt to kill, is no breach of the peace of the state." Suppose he hears it decided in the same place that no insult or outrage upon any slave is considered worthy of legal redress, unless it impairs his property value. Suppose he hears, as he would in Virginia, that it is the policy of the law to protect the master even in inflicting cruel, malicious and excessive punishment upon the slave. Suppose a slave is murdered, and he hears the lawyers arguing that it cannot be considered a murder, because the slave, in law, is not considered a human being; and then suppose the case is appealed to a superior court, and he hears the judge expending his forces on a long and eloquent dissertation to prove that the slave is a human being; at least, that he is as much so as a lunatic, an idiot, or an unborn child, and that, therefore, he can be murdered. (See Judge Clark's speech, on p. 75 .) Suppose he sees that all the administration of law with regard to the slave proceeds on the idea that he is absolutely nothing more than a bale of merchandise. Suppose he hears such language as this, which occurs in the reasonings of the Brazealle case, and which is a fair sample of the manner in which such subjects are ordinarily discussed. "The slave has no more political capacity, no more right to purchase, hold or transfer property, than the mule in his plough; he is in himself but a mere chattel,—the subject of absolute ownership." Suppose he sees on the statute-book such sentences as these, from the civil code of Louisiana:

Art. 2500. The latent defects of slaves and animals are divided into two classes,—vices of body and vices of character.

Art. 2501. The vices of body are distinguished into absolute and relative.

Art. 2502. The absolute vices of slaves are leprosy, madness and epilepsy.

Art. 2503. The absolute vices of horses and mules are short wind, glanders, and founder.

The influence of this language is made all the stronger on the young mind from the fact that it is not the language of contempt, or of passion, but of calm, matter-of-fact, legal statement.

What effect must be produced on the mind of the young man when he comes to see that, however atrocious and however well-proved be the murder of a slave, the murderer uniformly escapes; and that, though the cases where the slave has fallen a victim to passions of the white are so multiplied, yet the fact of an execution for such a crime is yet almost unknown in the country? Does not all this tend to produce exactly that estimate of the value of negro life and happiness which Frederic Douglass says was expressed by a common proverb among the white boys where he was brought up: "It's worth sixpence to kill a nigger, and sixpence more to bury him"?

We see the public sentiment which has been formed by this kind of education exhibited by the following paragraph from the Cambridge Democrat, Md., Oct. 27, 1852. That paper quotes the following from the Woodville Republican, of Mississippi. It seems a Mr. Joshua Johns had killed a slave, and had been sentenced therefor to the penitentiary for two years. The Republican thus laments his hard lot:

This cause resulted in the conviction of Johns, and his sentence to the penitentiary for two years. Although every member of the jury, together with the bar, and the public generally, signed a petition to the governor for young Johns' pardon, yet