Page:The Barbarism of Slavery.djvu/44

 Justice Ruffin, of North-Carolina, who, in a solemn decision, thus portrays, affirms, and deplores this terrible latitude:

"'The obedience of the slave,' he says, ‘is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. . . . The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect. I must freely confess my sense of the harshness of this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can. And as a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But in the actual condition of things, it must be so. There is no remedy. This discipline belongs to the state of Slavery. It is inherent in the relation of master and slave.'" — The State v. Mann, 2 Devereaux R., 292.

And this same terrible latitude has been thus expounded in a recent judicial decision of Virginia:

“It is the policy of the law in respect to the relation of master and slave, and for the sake of securing proper subordination and obedience on the part of the slave, to protect the master from prosecution, even if the whipping and punishment be malicious, cruel, and excessive." — Santher v. Cwelt, 7 Grattan, 673.

Can Barbarism further go? Mere is an irresponsible power, rendered more irresponsible still by the seclusion of the plantation, and absolutely fortified by the supplementary law excluding the testimony of slaves. That under its shelter enormities should occur, stranger than fiction, too terrible for imagination, and surpassing any individual experience, is simply according to the course of nature and the course of history. The visitation of the abbeys in England disclosed vice and disorder in startling forms, cloaked by the irresponsible privacy of monastic life. A similar visitation of plantations would disclose more fearful results, cloaked by the irresponsible privacy of Slavery. Every Slave-master on his plantation is a Bashaw, with all the prerogatives of a Turk. According to Hobbes, he is a “petty king." This is true; and every plantation is of itself a petty kingdom, with more than the immunities of an abbey. Six thousand skulls of infants are said to have been taken from a single fish-pond near a nunnery, to the dismay of Pope Gregory, Under the law of Slavery, infants, the offspring of masters “who dream of Freedom in a slave's embrace," are not thrown into a fish-pond, but something worse is done. They are sold. But this is only a single glimpse. Slavery, in its recesses, is another Bastile, whose horrors will never be known until it all is razed to the ground; it is the dismal castle of Giant Despair, which, when captured by the Pilgrims, excited their wonder, as they saw “the dead bodies that lay here and there in the castle-yard, and how full of dead men's bones the dungeon was" The