Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/56

42 pantaloons for the winter; and for food, one pint of salt and a barrel of Indian corn, rice, or beans, every month. In North Carolina, the law decides that a quart of corn per day is sufficient. But, if the slave does not receive this poor allowance, who can prove the fact. The withholding of proper sustenance is absolutely incapable of proof, unless the evidence of the sufferer himself be allowed; and the law, as if determined to obstruct the administration of justice, permits the master to exculpate himself by an oath that the charges against him are false. Clothing may, indeed, be ascertained by inspection; but who is likely to involve himself in quarrels with a white master because a poor negro receives a few rags less than the law provides? I apprehend that a person notorious for such gratuitous acts of kindness, would have little peace or safety, in any slave-holding country.

If a negro be compelled to toil night and day, (as it is said they sometimes are, at the season of sugar-making) who is to prove that he works more than his fourteen or fifteen hours? No slave can be a witness for himself, or for his fellow-slaves; and should a white man happen to know the fact, there are ninetynine chances out of a hundred, that he will deem it prudent to be silent. And here I would remark that even in the island of Jamaica, where the laws have given a most shocking license to cruelty,—even in Jamaica, the slave is compelled to work but ten hours in the day, beside having many holidays allowed him. In Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, the convicts condemned to hard labor in the penitentiaries, are required by law to toil only from eight to ten hours a day, according to the season of the year; yet the law providing that the innocent slave should labor but fourteen or fifteen hours a day, professes to have been made as a merciful amelioration of his lot!—In Rome, the slaves had a yearly festival called the Saturnalia, during which they were released from toil, changed places with their masters, and indulged in unbounded merriment; at first it lasted but one day; but its duration afterwards extended to two, three,