Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/81

Rh most formal and technical minuteness, or the act is void. Does the master solemnly covenant with his slave to emancipate him? the contract can be revoked at the master's will. No extraordinary service of the slave, except in North Carolina, would be held "a good consideration" and sufficient to bind the bargain. In some States, as Maryland and Virginia, in fact—no person under thirty nor over five-and-forty can be emancipated.

Take all the slave-laws of the United States together, consider the race that has made them, their religion, the political ideas of their government, that it is in the nineteenth century after Christ, and they form the most revolting work of legislation to be found in the annals of any pacific people. The codes of the Barbarians who sat on the ruins of the Roman Empire—the Burgundians, Bavarians, the Allemanni, with the Visigoths and their northern kin—have left enactments certainly more terrible in themselves. But the darkness of that period shrouds all those barbarian legislations in a general and homogeneous gloom; and here, it is "the freest and most enlightened nation of the world," who keeps, extends, and intensifies the dreadful statutes which make men only things, binds them and sells them as brute cattle. In 1102, the council of London decreed that "hereafter no one shall presume to carry on the nefarious business in which, hitherto, men in England are wont to be sold as brute beasts." The churches of America have no voice of rebuke—no word of entreaty—when Christian clergymen sell their brothers in the market. The flag of America and the majesty of the law defend that "business," which the Anglo-Saxon bishops, seven hundred and forty-five years ago, looked on as "nefarious," nefarium negotium. M. de Tocqueville regarded the American slave-code as "Legislation stained by unparalleled atrocities; a despotism directed against the human mind; legislation which forbids the slaves to be taught to read and write, and which aims to sink them as nearly as possible to the level of the brutes."

The effect of slavery appears in the general legislation of the South. In wisdom and humanity it is far behind the North. It is there that laws are most bloody; punishments most barbarous and vindictive; that irregular violence takes most often the place of legal procedure;