Page:Why colored people in Philadelphia are excluded from the street cars.djvu/24

 miles long by four broad and at the time in question contained about 6000 inhabitants. These murders were well known to the slave population, when committed, and as testimony afterwards proved, to many of the Whites. But Hodge was not brought to trial till 1811, and then formal complaint against him only reached his brother magistrates through a family quarrel about property. John M'Donough declined to serve on the jury because "the case would make the negroes saucy" Stephen M'Keough, a planter and an important witness, who saw some of these cases of flogging which ended in death, described Mr. Hodge as "a good man, but comical, because he had bad slaves." Both the Attorney General and the presiding Judge, apparently functionaries from England, thought it necessary to go into a set argument to show that killing negro slaves was really murder, and the jury, under the charge, brought Hodge in guilty, but recommended him to mercy. Here was moral blindness produced by an atmosphere of slavery which can only find its physical counterpart in the eyeless fishes bred in the dark waters of the Kentucky cave. Probably no case could be found in our Southern States equal to this in enormity of crime and corresponding absence of moral vision in respect to it, though that of Mrs. Abraham, of Virginia, with her four murders, and the alacrity with which "all the Richmond lawyers" volunteered in her defence may approach it. In Pennsylvania the slaves were never more than a sprinkling compared to the free population, slavery never appeared in these dark colors, and it was early declared to be prospectively abolished. And yet this old, unmistakable characteristic of the slaveholder—defect of moral vision where the black man is concerned, is to this day a distinct feature of our society. We are still unable to see clearly the wickedness of denying him the vote and expelling him from the cars; and the same spirit of outrage and murder, which now shocks us by the terrible energy with which it moves the late slaveholders against the freedmen, is at this moment acting in a small, feeble, mean way within ourselves against our own colored population. The difference is one of degree, not of kind. Thus, eighty-six years after the passage of the act for the gradual emancipation of the slaves of Pennsylvania, life enough remains in the old institution, long since