Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

It is in the last period of ten years, from 1830 to 1840, that this consuming plague of slavery has shown its worst effects in the old Southern States. Including the increase in their newly-settled and western counties, they gained in population only 7¹⁄₂ per cent.; while cold, barren, thickly peopled New England gained 15, and the old Middle States 26 per cent. East Virginia actually fell off 26,000 in population; and, with the exception of Richmond and one or two other towns, her population continues to decline. Old Virginia was the first to sow this land of ours with slavery; she is also the first to reap the full harvest of destruction. Her lowland neighbors of Maryland and the Carolinas were not far behind at the _seeding_; nor are they far behind at the ingathering of desolation.

Let us take the rich and beautiful State of Kentucky, compared with her free neighbor Ohio. The slaves of Kentucky have composed less than a fourth part of her population. But mark their effect upon the comparative growth of the state. In the year 1800, Kentucky contained 221,000 inhabitants, and Ohio, 45,000. In forty years, the population of Kentucky had risen to 780,000; that of Ohio to 1,519,000. This wonderful difference could not be owing to any natural superiority of the Ohio country. Kentucky is nearly as large, nearly as fertile, and quite equal, in other gifts of nature. She had greatly the advantage, too, in the outset of this forty years’ race of population. She started with 5¹⁄₂ inhabitants to the square mile, and came out with 20: Ohio started with one inhabitant to the square mile, and came out with 38. Kentucky had full possession of her territory at the beginning. Much of Ohio was then, and for a long time afterwards, in possession of the Indians. Ohio is by this time considerably more than twice as thickly peopled as Kentucky; yet she still gains, both by natural increase and by the influx of emigrants; while Kentucky has for twenty years been receiving much fewer emigrants than Ohio, and multitudes of her citizens have been yearly moving off to newer and yet newer countries.

Compare this natural increase with the census returns, and it appears that, in the ten years from 1830 to 1840, Virginia lost by emigration no fewer than 375,000 of her people, of whom East Virginia lost 304,000, and West Virginia 71,000. At this rate Virginia supplies the west every ten years with a population equal in number to the population of the State of Mississippi in 1840!

Some Virginia politicians, proudly,--yes, _proudly_, fellow-citizens,--call our old commonwealth _The Mother of States_! These _enlightened_ patriots might pay her a still higher compliment, by calling her _The Grandmother_ of States. For our part, we are grieved and mortified to think of the lean and haggard condition of our venerable mother. Her black children have sucked her so dry, that now, for a long time past, she has not milk enough for her offspring, either black or white.

She has sent,--or we should rather say, she has driven,--from her soil at least one third of all the emigrants who have gone from the old states to the new. More than another third have gone from the other old slave states. Many of these multitudes, who have left the slave states, have shunned the regions of slavery, and settled in the free countries of the west. These were generally industrious and enterprising white men, who found, by sad experience, that a country of slaves was not the country for them. It is a truth, a certain truth, that _slavery drives free laborers,--farmers, mechanics, and all, and some of the best of them too,--out of the country, and fills their places with negroes_.

It is admitted on all hands, that slave labor is better adapted to agriculture than to any other branch of industry; and that, if not good for agriculture, it is really good for nothing.

Therefore, since in agriculture slave labor is proved to be far less productive than free labor, _slavery is demonstrated to be not only unprofitable, but deeply injurious to the public prosperity_.

We do not mean that slave labor can never earn any thing for him that employs it. The question is between free labor and slave labor. He that chooses to employ a sort of labor that yields only half as much to the hand as another sort would yield, makes a choice that is not only unprofitable, but deeply injurious to his interest.

Agriculture in the slave states may be characterized in general by two epithets, _extensive_, _exhaustive_,--which in all agricultural countries forebode two things, _impoverishment_, _depopulation_. The general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much land, badly, for present gain,--in short, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They cannot do otherwise with laborers who work by compulsion, for the benefit only of their masters, and whose sole interest in the matter is to do as little and to consume as much as possible.

This ruinous system of large farms cultivated by slaves showed its effects in Italy, eighteen hundred years ago, when the Roman empire was at the height of its grandeur.

Pliny, a writer of that age, in his Natural History, (Book 18, c. 1-7,) tells us, that while the small farms of former times were cultivated by freemen, and even great commanders did not disdain to labor with their own hands, agriculture flourished, and provisions were abundant; but that afterwards, when the lands were engrossed by a few great proprietors, and cultivated by fettered and branded slaves, the country was ruined, and corn had to be imported. The same system was spreading ruin over the provinces, and thus the prosperity of the empire was undermined. Pliny denounces, as the worst of all, the system of having large estates in the country cultivated by slaves, or indeed, says he, “_to have any thing done by men who labor without hope of reward_.”

So Livy, the great Roman historian, observed, some years before Pliny, (Book 6, c. 12,) that “innumerable multitudes of men formerly inhabited those parts of Italy, where, in his time, none but slaves redeemed the country from desertion;”--that is, a dense population of free laborers had been succeeded by a sparse population of slaves.

Even the common mechanical trades do not flourish in a slave state. Some mechanical operations must, indeed, be performed in every civilized country; but the general rule in the south is, to import from abroad every fabricated thing that can be carried in ships, such as household furniture, boats, boards, laths, carts, ploughs, axes, and axehelves, besides innumerable other things, which free communities are accustomed to make for themselves. What is most wonderful is, that the forests and iron mines of the south supply, in great part, the materials out of which these things are made. The northern freemen come with their ships, carry home the timber and pig iron, work them up, supply their own wants with a part, and then sell the rest at a good profit in the southern markets. Now, although mechanics, by setting up their shops in the south, could save all these freights and profits, yet so it is, that northern mechanics will not settle in the south, and the southern mechanics are undersold by their northern competitors.

Now connect with these wonderful facts another fact, and the mystery is solved. The number of mechanics, in different parts of the south, is in the inverse ratio of the number of slaves; or in other words, where the slaves form the largest proportion of the inhabitants, there the mechanics and manufacturers form the least. In those parts only where the slaves are comparatively few, are many mechanics and artificers to be found; but even in these parts they do not flourish as the same useful class of men flourish in the free states. Even in our Valley of Virginia, remote from the sea, many of our mechanics can hardly stand against northern competition. This can be attributed only to slavery, which paralyzes our energies, disperses our population, and keeps us few and poor, in spite of the bountiful gifts of nature with which a benign Providence has endowed our country.

Of all the states in this Union, not one has on the whole such various and abundant resources for manufacturing as our own Virginia, both East and West. Only think of her vast forests of timber, her mountains of iron, her regions of stone coal, her valleys of limestone and marble, her fountains of salt, her immense sheep-walks for wool, her vicinity to the cotton fields, her innumerable waterfalls, her bays, harbors, and rivers for circulating products on every side;--in short, every material and every convenience necessary for manufacturing industry.

Above all, think of Richmond, nature’s chosen site for the greatest manufacturing city in America,--her beds of coal and iron, just at hand, her incomparable water power, her tide-water navigation, conducting sea vessels from the foot of her falls, and above them her fine canal to the mountains, through which lie the shortest routes from the eastern tides to the great rivers of the west and the south-west. Think, also, that this Richmond, in old Virginia, “the mother of states,” has enjoyed these unparalleled advantages ever since the United States became a nation;--and then think again, that this same Richmond, the metropolis of all Virginia, has fewer manufactures than a third-rate New England town;--fewer,--not than the new city of Lowell, which is beyond all comparison,--but fewer than the obscure place called Fall River, among the barren hills of Massachusetts;--and then, fellow-citizens, what will you think,--what _must_ you think,--of the cause of this strange phenomenon? Or, to enlarge the scope of the question: What must you think has caused Virginians in general to neglect their superlative advantages for manufacturing industry?--to disregard the evident suggestions of nature, pointing out to them this fruitful source of population, wealth, and comfort?

Say not that this state of things is chargeable to the _apathy_ of Virginians. That is nothing to the purpose, for it does not go to the bottom of the subject. What causes the apathy? That is the question.

The last census gave also the cost of constructing new buildings in each state, exclusive of the value of the materials. The amount of this is a good test of the increase of wealth in a country. To compare different states in this particular, we must divide the total cost of building by the number of inhabitants, and see what the average will be for each inhabitant. We find that it is in Massachusetts, $3·60; in Connecticut, $3·50; in New York, $3·00; in New Jersey, $2·70; in Pennsylvania, $3·10; in Maryland, $2·30; and in Virginia, $1·10.

No state has greater conveniences for ship navigation and ship building than Virginia. Yet on all her fine tide waters she has little shipping; and what she has is composed almost wholly of small bay craft and a few coasting schooners.

We do not blame our southern people for abstaining from all employments of this kind. What could they do? Set their negroes to building ships? Who ever imagined such an absurdity? But could they not hire white men to do such things? No; for, in the first place, southern white men have no skill in such matters; and, in the second place, northern workmen cannot be hired in the south, without receiving a heavy premium for working in a slave state.

The boast of our West Virginia is the good city of Wheeling. Would that she was six times as large, that she might equal Pittsburg, and that she grew five times as fast, that she might keep up with her!

We glory in Wheeling, because she only, in Virginia, deserves to be called a manufacturing town. For this her citizens deserve to be crowned,--not with laurel,--but with the solid gold of prosperity. But how came it that Wheeling, and next to her, Wellsburg,--of all the towns in Virginia,--should become manufacturing towns? Answer: They breathe the atmosphere of free states, almost touching them on both sides. But again; seeing that Wheeling, as a seat for manufactures, is equal to Pittsburg, and inferior to no town in America, except Richmond; and that, moreover, she has almost no slaves; why is Wheeling so far behind Pittsburg, and comparatively so slow in her growth? Answer: She is in a country in which slavery is established by law.

We shall explain, by examples, how a few slaves in a country may do its citizens more immediate injury than a large number.

When a white family own fifty or one hundred slaves, they can, so long as their land produces well, afford to be indolent and expensive in their habits; for though each yields only a small profit, yet each member of the family has ten or fifteen of these black work-animals to toil for his support. It is not until the fields grow old, and the crops grow short, and the negroes and the overseer take nearly all, that the day of ruin can be no longer postponed. If the family be not _very_ indolent and _very_ expensive, this inevitable day may not come before the third generation. But the ruin of small slaveholders is often accomplished in a single lifetime.

When a white family own five or ten slaves, they cannot afford to be indolent and expensive in their habits; for one black drudge cannot support one white gentleman or lady. Yet, because they are slaveholders, this family will feel some aspirations for a life of easy gentility; and because field work and kitchen work are negroes’ work, the young gentlemen will dislike to go with the negroes to dirty field work, and the young ladies will dislike to join the black sluts in any sort of household labor. Such unthrifty sentiments are the natural consequence of introducing slaves among the families of a country, especially negro slaves. They infallibly grow and spread, creating among the white families a distaste for all servile labor, and a desire to procure slaves who may take all drudgery off their hands. Thus general industry gives way by degrees to indolent relaxation, false notions of dignity and refinement, and a taste for fashionable luxuries. Then debts slyly accumulate. The result is, that many families are compelled by their embarrassments to sell off and leave the country. Many who are unable to buy slaves leave it also, because they feel degraded, and cannot prosper, where slavery exists. Citizens of the valley! is it not so? Is not this the chief reason why your beautiful country does not prosper like the northern valleys?

We have examined the census of counties for the last thirty or forty years, in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, with the view to discover the law of population in the northern slave states. The following are among the general results:--

When a county had at first comparatively few slaves, the slave population, except near the free borders, gained upon the whites, and most rapidly in the older parts of the country.

The population, as a whole, increased so long as the slaves were fewer than the whites, but more slowly as the numbers approached to equality. In our valley, a smaller proportion of slaves had the effect of a larger one in East Virginia, to retard the increase of population.

When the slaves became as numerous as the whites in the eastern and older parts of the country, population came to a stand; when they outnumbered the whites, it declined. Consequently, the slave population has tended to diffuse itself equally over the country, rising more rapidly as it was further below the white population, and going down when it had risen above them.

The price of cotton has regulated the price of negroes in Virginia; and so it must continue to do; because slave labor is unprofitable here, and nothing keeps up the price of slaves but their value as a marketable commodity in the south. Eastern negroes and western cattle are alike in this, that, if the market abroad go down or be closed, both sorts of animals, the horned and the woolly-headed, become a worthless drug at home. The fact is, that our eastern brethren must send off, on any terms, the increase of their slaves, because their impoverished country cannot sustain even its present stock of negroes. We join not the English and American abolition cry about “slave-breeding” in East Virginia, as if it were a chosen occupation, and therefore a reproachful one. It is no such thing, but a case of dire necessity, and many a heartache does it cost the good people there. But behold in the east the doleful consequences of letting slavery grow up to an oppressive and heart-sickening burden upon a community! Cast it off, West Virginians, whilst yet you have the power; for if you let it descend unbroken to your children, it will have grown to a mountain of misery upon their heads.

Good policy will require the Southern States, ere long, to close their markets against northern negroes. When the southern slave market is closed, or when, by the reduced profits of slave labor in the south, it becomes glutted,--then the stream of Virginia negroes, heretofore pouring down upon the south, will be thrown back upon the state, and, like a river dammed up, must spread itself over the whole territory of the commonwealth. The head spring in East Virginia cannot contain itself; it must find vent; it will shed its black streams through every gap of the Blue Ridge and pour over the Alleghany, till it is checked by abolitionism on the borders. But even abolitionism cannot finally stop it. Abolitionism itself will tolerate slavery, when slaveholders grow sick and tired of it.

In plain terms, fellow-citizens, eastern slaveholders will come with their multitudes of slaves to settle upon the fresh lands of West Virginia. Eastern slaves will be sent by thousands for a market in West Virginia. Every valley will echo with the cry, “Negroes! Negroes for sale! Dog cheap! Dog cheap!” And because they are dog cheap, many of our people will buy them. We have shown how slavery has prepared the people for this; how a little slavery makes way for more, and how the law of slave increase operates to fill up every part of the country to the same level with slaves.

And then, fellow-citizens, when you have suffered your country to be filled with negro slaves instead of white freemen; when its population shall be as motley as Joseph’s coat of many colors; as ring-streaked and speckled as father Jacob’s flock was in Padan Aram,--what will the white basis of representation avail you, if you obtain it? Whether you obtain it or not, East Virginia will have triumphed; or, rather, _slavery_ will have triumphed, and all Virginia will have become a land of darkness and of the shadow of death.

Then, by a forbearance which has no merit, and a supineness which has no excuse, you will have given to your children, for their inheritance, this lovely land blackened with a negro population,--the offscourings of Eastern Virginia, the fag-end of slavery, the loathsome dregs of that cup of abomination which has already sickened to death the eastern half of our commonwealth.

Delay, not, then, we beseech you, to raise a barrier against this Stygian inundation, to stand at the Blue Ridge, and with sovereign energy say to this Black Sea of misery, “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr. Madison thought the original ordinance to be clearly invalid. See Federalist, No. 38. It is just as clear that he thought the constitution gave validity to it. See Federalist, No. 43.

[2] Here Mr. HILLIARD, of Alabama, rose to ask if the south, by the Missouri compromise, had not surrendered its right to carry slavery north of the compromise line? His question was not understood. If it had been, it would have been replied, that the existence of slavery at New Orleans, and a few other places in Louisiana, at the time of the treaty with France, by no means established the right to carry it to the Pacific Ocean, if the treaty extended so far. Slavery being against natural right, can only exist by virtue of positive law, backed by force sufficient to protect it. It could not lawfully exist, therefore, in any part of Louisiana, which had not been laid out, organized, and subjected to the civil jurisdiction of the government. Such was not the case with any part of the territory north of the compromise line, and therefore nothing was surrendered. On the other hand, in the formation of the territorial governments of Orleans, Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida, a vast extent of country was surrendered to slavery. And this is independent of the question whether Congress, by the constitution, has any more right to establish slavery _any where_ than it has to establish an inquisition, create an order of nobility, or anoint a king.

[3] Essays on Domestic Industry, or an Inquiry into the Expediency of establishing Cotton Manufactories in South Carolina, 1845.

SKETCH

OF THE OPENING ARGUMENT IN THE CASE OF THE UNITED STATES _vs._ DANIEL DRAYTON, INDICTED, (IN FORTY-ONE SEVERAL BILLS OF INDICTMENT,) FOR STEALING AND CARRYING AWAY, IN THE SCHOONER PEARL, A CARGO OF SLAVES FROM WASHINGTON, IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, ON THE NIGHT OF THE 15TH OF APRIL, 1848; TRIED BEFORE THOMAS H. CRAWFORD, JUDGE OF THE CRIMINAL COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. P. B. KEY, DISTRICT ATTORNEY; HORACE MANN AND JAMES M. CARLISLE, COUNSEL FOR THE PRISONER.

GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY;

I rise before you under circumstances rarely exceeded in embarrassment. I am an utter stranger to his honor, the judge, and to all of you, gentlemen, who compose the jury. Among all the eager faces in this crowded hall, there is not one with which I am familiar. I suppose there is not one man in this vast assembly who has any sympathy for my client or for me.

The case before us is acknowledged, on all sides, to be one of great moment. It directly affects human interests,--large pecuniary interests,--and these are among the most active and powerful of human impulses. It is a case which has given birth to great excitement. It has been narrated with formidable exaggerations in the public papers; it has been angrily discussed in both houses of Congress, and bruited over the land. From what has transpired in and about this court room, since the trial commenced, I perceive that each individual seems not only to be convinced that the prisoner at the bar has committed a great offence, but, like a light reflected from a multiplying glass, he sees that offence multiplied a thousand fold in the opinions and feelings of those around him. I cannot forbear to add, that it is a case, also, which, in some of its aspects, touches the deepest and tenderest sympathies of the human heart; for this prosecution not only deals with human beings as offenders, but with human beings and human rights, as the subject matters of the offence.

We have been called to trial, too, at an untimely hour. I have not had time for the preparation and investigation which so important a case demands. Added to this, my colleague, [Mr. CARLISLE,] was taken ill on the day he was retained, and, until the evening immediately preceding the commencement of the trial, I had no opportunity for a single interview with him, and then but for an hour, in his sick chamber. During all this time, too, as some of you may know, my attention has been called away by official duties elsewhere.

Gentlemen, let me come a little closer to my relations to this case and to yourselves. I stand here, on this side of the table; you sit there, on the other side. Our _persons_ are near to each other; but should I not greatly deceive myself, were I to suppose that our _opinions_ were as near together as our persons? We are within shaking-hands’ distance of each other; still, our convictions and sentiments on certain subjects may be wide asunder as the poles. On a subject of vast importance and gravity,--a subject reflected from every feature of this case,--I was born, and from my birth have been trained up, in one set of ideas; and I mean no discourtesy when I say that you have been born and trained in another set of ideas. Hence it is natural, yes, it is inevitable,--is it not?--that we should approach this subject with widely different views, and, as it were, from opposite points of the moral compass. I am admonished, then, in the outset, that your prepossessions are against me. The frame of your minds must be adverse to the reception of my views. We are in a position where the hearer, consciously or unconsciously, braces himself against the pressure of the speaker’s arguments. And of all difficult positions in which advocate or orator was ever placed, the most difficult is that of encountering the honest antipathies of his hearers. The heart, secure in its own convictions, closes itself against the argument that would overthrow them, as a fond parent bars his doors against the foe that would carry away his children.

But, gentlemen, amid all these adverse circumstances, and amid these conflicts of hostile and perhaps irreconcilable feelings, is there not some common ground on which you and I can stand together, and greet each other as brethren? Is there not one spot where we can stand side by side, as friends, sympathize with each other, and act together in harmony? Yes, gentlemen, there _is_ one such spot. _It is the ground of_ DUTY. In this case, I have certain duties to perform; you, too, have certain duties to perform; and the feeling of a common duty is always creative of the feeling of brotherhood. We are called to these duties as by the voice of God; we are to perform them as under the eye of the Omniscient. Here we are embarked in a common cause. From this moment, then, let all feelings of alienation or repugnance be banished from between us.

Gentlemen, this prisoner has requested me to be his counsel; and I, perhaps unwisely, have acceded to his request. I have taken an oath to be true to him. This has imposed certain responsibilities upon me, which, before Heaven, I may not escape. In this I find my strength. With the fierce excitement, which blazed forth in this District when the prisoners of the “Pearl” were first arrested, still hot around me; with the generally adverse feelings which I suppose you entertain towards the side of the cause which I have espoused, and therefore against its advocate; with these thronged spectators, who show, at every turn and incident of the trial, what their feelings are towards the prisoner and his defenders, I should not be able to stand here one moment, were it not for the supporting, uplifting sentiment, glowing through every fibre of my frame, that I am here in the performance of a high and holy duty. In all else I may be weak; in this I am strong.[4]

So you, gentlemen, sit there to perform a duty. Swearing upon the Holy Evangelists, you have invoked the vengeance of Heaven upon your souls, if, consciously and wittingly, you swerve a hair’s breadth from the line of rectitude; if you allow any partiality in favor of a cherished institution, or any prejudice against the prisoner, to close your eyes or blind your minds to any fact of evidence or rule of law which may be adduced in his behalf.

I might even add a consideration of a lighter nature leading to the same result. Your fortune and mine, for some days to come, I suppose to be settled. I know not how protracted this trial may be, but, gentlemen, we are in it, for longer or shorter, for better or worse; and while we are in it, we shall be obliged to come together from day to day, and live in each other’s presence and company. Now, I trust you have too much philosophy about you to make bad worse. And so of myself. Were we fellow-travellers in the same stage-coach or steamboat, and were doomed to be so for a week or a fortnight, it would be most unwise to add to our inevitable discomforts that of striving to annoy each other; so, when packed together in this room, which seems to have been constructed for creatures that do not breathe, and with the thermometer above ninety degrees, I trust any icy feelings we may have had towards each other will speedily melt away. In a word, I heartily concur, and I trust you will do the same, in the opinion of the old man who declared, according to the anecdote, that after the experience of a long life, he had found it best to submit to what he could not possibly help.

What, then, is the business before us? Daniel Drayton is set here at the bar charged with a grave offence, and you are impanelled to try him. And who is Daniel Drayton? We shall prove to you that he is a man of sober and industrious life, against whose character, as a just, upright, exemplary citizen, no charge was ever before preferred. Whatever may have been his errors in regard to the transaction which has brought him before you, he has, in consequence of it, passed through scenes which must move your sympathy. He has been torn from his family and immured in a loathsome cell. From feeling that sense of security from lawless violence, which every man, whether guilty or innocent, is entitled to feel, he has been in imminent danger of being torn in pieces by an infuriated mob. Yes, gentlemen, on Tuesday, the eighteenth day of April last, this man, this fellow-citizen of ours, in this capital of the nation, within sight of Congress, and of the President’s house, and within hearing of them, too, was pursued by a mob, from near the river’s side on the south of us to the very doors of the jail on the north,--a mob estimated to consist of from four to six thousand people,--many of them armed with deadly weapons; the thrusts of a dirk knife, which was drawn upon him, coming within an inch of his body; amid wrathful cries of “Hang him!” “Lynch him!” accompanied by all the profanities and abominations of speech which usually issue from the foul throat of that hideous monster--A MOB. Arrived at the jail, the mob besieged him there. When afterwards, and while under examination before magistrates of the city, a distinguished gentleman and member of Congress, [the Hon. Joshua R. Giddings, of Ohio,] appeared at his request and in his defence, the mob surrounded the gates of the jail, demanding the immediate expulsion of the counsel; and the jailer, to save bloodshed, insisted upon his departure. The storm swept beyond the prison and the prisoner. It assailed all who were supposed to sympathize with him. The office of a newspaper in this city, (the National Era,) was threatened with demolition. At a mob meeting, votes were passed,--without any great scrutiny, I presume, into the qualifications of the voters,--that the paper should be discontinued. Its editor was waited upon at night, or at midnight, by a mob-elected committee, and a peremptory demand was made upon him to remove his establishment beyond the District, or to abandon it.

But I will not dwell longer upon these details, so disgraceful to the capital of a republic that calls itself _free_, and so abhorrent to the feelings of every right-minded man. Were I to enumerate all the perils, the indignities, and the privations to which my client has been subjected, the day would be too short for the narration.

After Drayton’s examination, he was held to bail. And what, think you, was the amount of the bail demanded? Seventy-six thousand dollars! and seventy-six thousand dollars also for each of the other prisoners,--$228,000 for the seventy-six alleged slaves, when the common market value of such slaves in this neighborhood would not, I suppose, be more than three or four hundred dollars apiece;--and though all of them, too, had been returned, and were in possession of their claimants at the time. Has the fact never yet come to the knowledge of the magistrates of the District of Columbia, that the constitution of the United States declares that “excessive bail shall not be required”?

But, gentlemen, these are not the only hardships and oppressions to which my client has been subjected. How many, at the most, are the offences against the laws of this District which he has committed? He came here on the 13th of April, in the schooner Pearl. He departed on the 15th. On the 17th, he was arrested near the mouth of the Potomac, with a company of alleged slaves on board his vessel. Was not this all one transaction? Can it be divided and separated into a multitude of distinct offences? Can this one deed be made an offence against different laws? If not, then there is another clause in the constitution set at nought,--that clause which declares that no person shall be “subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.”

And yet, gentlemen, what do we find on the records of this court? One hundred and fifteen indictments against this prisoner for this one act; and one hundred and fifteen indictments also against each of the other prisoners for engaging in the same. Three hundred and forty-five indictments! Reams of indictments for a single deed! Nor is this the only injustice. Each of the prisoners is indicted for having violated, by this one act, separate and distinct laws. There is an old law of Maryland against stealing slaves, and another law against transporting them out of the jurisdiction; and these laws are claimed, by virtue of an act of Congress, to be in force in this District. Now, if the prisoner stole the slaves, he is not guilty of the separate offence of transporting. If he is guilty of transporting, he is not guilty of stealing. That the two offences should have been committed by one and the same act, is a legal impossibility. If the grand jury first found the prisoner guilty of the offence of stealing the slaves, they thereby declared that he was not guilty of the different offence of transporting. Or, if they first found him guilty of the offence of transporting, they thereby declared that he was not guilty of the separate offence of stealing. To proceed, therefore, after a finding for one offence, to charge the prisoner with the other, was not only a legal absurdity, but a grievous injustice.

Besides, if these slaves were stolen, as is alleged, from forty-one different masters, the whole might have been charged in different counts in the same indictment, and the prisoner might be found guilty upon as many of the counts as law and evidence would warrant.

So there was but one act of transportation. Even, therefore, if it were just to charge the prisoner with the breach of two different laws for the same act, still, as the transportation of the whole was but one, it should have been charged only in one indictment.

See how fatal to any man must such a course of proceeding be. If the stealing were charged in one indictment, it would be tried by one jury; and the evidence being to a great degree the same, the whole trial might be brought within a limited period of time. But with forty-one indictments, there must be forty-one trials, before forty-one different juries; for neither government nor prisoner would consent that a jury, who had given an adverse verdict, should try another of the cases. Now, gentlemen, I care not for the enormous expense of such a proceeding,--ten dollars on each indictment, enuring to the benefit of the district attorney,--

Here Mr. KEY, the district attorney, interrupted and said: If Mr. Mann thinks I am to have ten dollars on each of these indictments, he is mistaken; and in my argument to the jury I shall deny it.

Mr. CARLISLE. Mr. Mann is not mistaken in the general statement, that the district attorney receives ten dollars on each indictment. He receives ten dollars on each, until the income of his office amounts to six thousand dollars a year. It is only when the emoluments of the office reach that sum that he ceases to draw his ten dollars on each indictment.

Mr. MANN. I was saying, gentlemen, that I care comparatively nothing for the amount of expense incurred in consequence of these three hundred and forty-five indictments. Far graver consequences than the mere expenditure of money are involved. Who can maintain or survive a contest against such a host of indictments, sustained by all the power and resources of the government? Were a man rich as Crœsus, it would exhaust his means. Were he brave as a martyr, it would outweary his endurance. Were he innocent as a child unborn, still, on the mere doctrine of chances, he might fail in some one case, out of such a multitude. Were he in the prime of life, its setting sun might go down in darkness and sorrow before the final verdict of acquittal could be pronounced in his favor. Under such a practice with regard to indictments, coupled with such a practice in regard to bail, an accusation would be as fatal as crime itself, however innocent the accused might be. The law provides a statute of limitations as to offences. Could it have foreseen such an abuse as this, it would have provided a statute of limitations against the number of prosecutions for a single offence; for the government might as well try a man, on a separate indictment, for each hair of a horse he had stolen, and hold him, on each of them, to separate bail. The English courts, gentlemen, have provided a remedy for the beginnings of this injustice. They have decided, again and again, that when even two indictments are found against a man for the same offence, they will compel the prosecutor to make his election between them,--to proceed upon one and abandon the other. 2 Leach’s Cr. Cas., 608, _Rex_ vs. _Doran_. 3 Carr. & P. 412, _Rex_ vs. _Smith_. Ib. _Rex_ vs. _Flower_, 413. 3 T. R. _Young_ vs. _The King_, (_in error_,) 106. See, also, in support of the same principle, New York Revised Statutes, vol. 2, part 4, ch. 2, § 42, where provision is made that “if there be at any time pending against the same defendant two or more indictments for the same offence, or two indictments for the same matter, although charged as different offences, the indictment first found shall be deemed to be superseded by such second indictment, and shall be quashed.”

But, gentlemen, there is another aspect of this case, which presents, in a manner still more glaring, the enormity of the proceeding to which we are subjected. Under each of the forty-one indictments against this prisoner for stealing, he is liable, if convicted, to be sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, which would make an aggregate imprisonment of more than eight hundred years. Methuselah himself must have been caught young, in order to survive such a sentence. The very shortest time which the court, in its discretion, could imprison, after a conviction on all these indictments, would be two hundred and eighty-seven years! Did the law ever contemplate so cruel and revengeful a proceeding? Did the law ever suppose that the court, after having sentenced a man to eight hundred years’ imprisonment, or even to two hundred and eighty years’ imprisonment, should go on, and sentence him to twenty years, or even to seven years more?--when the court must know that it would be imposing sentences to be executed centuries after the prisoner would be dead, and after he would have left his prison, not to return to this world, but to go to another.

But even this is not all. Behind these forty-one indictments for stealing stand drawn up, in battle array, against this same prisoner, seventy-four other indictments for transporting the very slaves whom he is charged to have stolen. The penalty for each of these offences is a fine of two hundred dollars, with imprisonment till paid. The aggregate of these fines would be $14,800. But a penalty not inflicted by the statute, but superadded by this unwarrantable proceeding of the government, is the defence of seventy-four successive cases, under which the wealthiest, the strongest, and the most innocent man must break down, and be swept to ruin.

Corresponding with the oppressive character of all these preliminaries was the manner of the prosecutor, in his opening argument. He has seen fit to use language against the prisoner the most vehement and denunciatory. He has imputed to him every base motive that can actuate a depraved heart, and showered upon him the coarsest epithets that can describe a villain. Now if it shall turn out that my client is innocent, then all these criminations are unjust and cruel; and even should it be proved that he is guilty, it is no part of his punishment to be compelled to sit here in enforced silence, hour after hour, and hear himself denounced and vilified in language as unfitted to his character as to the sobriety of judicial proceedings.

Gentlemen, the representative of the government, like the government itself, should be dispassionate and calm. Majesty is one of the attributes of sovereignty, and serenity is inseparable from majesty. The government is not a being of wrath, of ferocity, of vindictiveness; and the exhibition of such passions is as unsuitable to the representative of the government as to the government itself. Though the image of justice may be represented as holding the sword of power in one hand, yet she is also represented as holding the balance of equity in the other; but when the government assumes the guilt of the prisoner, before it has been found, and denounces him in bitterest epithets as criminal, while as yet the law presumes him to be innocent,--the only proper emblem of such a government is an image which, a few years ago, might have been seen surmounting the dome of the court house in Taunton, in the county of Somersetshire, in England, to which the artist had originally given both the balance and the sword; but a storm, careering through the sky, had swept the balance away, so that nothing but the avenging sword was left; and there the hateful figure stood aloft, an image of wrath untempered by equity.

But, gentlemen, let me trust that the prisoner has at length escaped from the turbulent and perilous scenes which have hitherto destroyed his peace and threatened his life. Let me trust that the fell spirits which prompted the proposal, made by one of his captors while he was yet on board the steamboat, and previous to his return to this city, that he should be brought up and hung at the yard-arm,--as was testified to by the government’s witnesses,--is at length exorcised; let me trust that the demoniac cry of vengeance which was shouted by the mob, and the thirst for blood which their conduct betokened, while the prisoner, bound and defenceless, was conducted from the river to the jail, has found no welcoming response in your bosoms. Let me trust, also, that the violence of manner and the bitterness of language which have been so freely employed in the opening of this case, have not disturbed the balance of your minds, or so ruffled their serenity that the images of truth shall be distorted as they are reflected from them.

Gentlemen, the spot on which a jury are seated should be a place separate and apart from the rest of the world; sacred, and inaccessible to the passions and prejudices that move the community without. It should be a place consecrated to the inquiry, “What is truth?” and to the application of its conclusions to the conduct of men. When you took your seats in that place, you were severally asked by the court whether you had formed any opinion respecting the guilt or innocence of the prisoner, and you severally answered in the negative. The final opinion, then, which shall be expressed in your verdict, must be an opinion which you have formed _since_ that time, and from the law and testimony here introduced. Into that opinion, no other element must be allowed to enter. The prejudged guilt of the prisoner, as manifested by repeated attempts to take his life; the demand which may exist, and which I suppose does exist, out of doors, that he shall be convicted, innocent or guilty; the anticipation that you are to meet an angry community, if you acquit him;--all these considerations, if they obtrude upon your minds, must be sternly rebuked and banished. The record of your verdict will survive these temporary excitements. It should be a verdict, therefore, which you can look upon, at the close of life, with conscientious satisfaction. It must be one which your children can look at with a filial and honorable regard for their fathers’ uprightness. In a case which has excited so much attention, both here and throughout the country, you, too, must expect to be put on trial; your verdict will go into the great record of history, to be passed upon by your country and by posterity.

Once, gentlemen, in the state to which I belong, a case arose in which the deepest and holiest feelings of the community were intensely excited. One of the preludes to the great drama of the American revolution was the slaughtering, in the year 1770, of five American citizens, in the streets of Boston, by the British soldiery. The supposed offenders were brought to trial for the homicide. They were defended by John Adams and Josiah Quincy,--illustrious names! The public breast throbbed with excitement. The sight of butchered countrymen made the blood seethe in the hearts of their fellow-citizens. If there ever could be a case where the law might be wrested to meet the popular outcry for redress; if there ever could be a case where the evidence might be strained and distorted to bring the facts within strained and distorted law, so as to visit a high outrage with a moral, if not a legal penalty, the “Boston Massacre” of 1770 supplied all its conditions. That cause was tried, and the prisoners were acquitted. The storm of popular disaffection soon cleared away, and now twelve purer and fairer names are not inscribed on the roll of fame than the names of those twelve jurymen, who dared to brave public opinion, and to perform an act of arduous, if not of perilous justice. Noble and illustrious bravery of the soul, which, when the yelling fiends of popular passion and prejudice beset the ascending pathway of virtue, can look to conscience, to posterity, and to God, and defy them all! Follow their example, gentlemen, and, whatever fierce sounds of public condemnation may be now rung in your ears, you will have the same glorious reward, and your children, and all the good men of your country, will honor your memories.

Gentlemen, in the vehement appeals which were made to you by the government’s counsel, for the condemnation of the prisoner, you were told that he had “invaded this District, and ruthlessly carried away more than a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of its property;” and you were warned that, if you let such a man escape, you might as well abandon at once all property in slaves. But it so happens, gentlemen, that you are sworn to try this prisoner for stealing John and Sam, two slaves of one Andrew Hoover, of the alleged value of fourteen hundred dollars only. Is each of these forty-one cases against the prisoner to be inflamed and exasperated by charging him with plundering the District to the amount of more than a hundred thousand dollars? A pretty strong effort of fancy, is it not? to work up the fourteen hundred dollars of the indictment into more than four millions in the argument! Is this to be another of the oppressive consequences of multiplying the one alleged offence of the prisoner into forty-one separate offences? Is the government’s counsel to botch up any sort of nefarious charge against the prisoner, and then call upon you to find him guilty on these strained and overwrought exaggerations of his conduct? No, gentlemen! This would be to suppose that you sit there to administer the worst kind of Lynch law,--a kind that has all its injustice, while screening itself from the odium of its violence. The object of civil society is to protect rights and to redress wrongs. For these great purposes laws are enacted, courts are established, juries are instituted, and rules of evidence are framed. Without civil society, each man would have a right to preserve his own rights and to redress his own wrongs. Civil society takes away something from a man’s rights, but it adds immensely to his powers; it makes him stronger than any individual oppressor, and, on the whole, it protects its members far better than they could protect themselves. But civil society, like every thing human, is imperfect. Once out of ten times, or once out of twenty times, it may fail to accomplish the end for which it was established. The very instruments it has framed may sometimes be the cause of its failure. What then? We do but fail in each tenth, or each twentieth case, when, without the social organization, failure might have been the general rule. And, therefore, even if a guilty person does sometimes escape, all we can say is that civil society has not done its work infallibly. It has done well, though it has not done all. But suppose this very civil society, wielding as it does the combined and terrible strength of the whole community, should turn its collected force against an innocent man, and crush him, then in what an utter and hopeless ruin is he overwhelmed! How much better for him had its powerful machinery never existed, than that he should be ground to powder beneath its wheels! Now, such might be the case with every prisoner, if juries were to act without strict obedience to law, and a strict observance of the forms of law. Any appeals, therefore, made to you, that because this prisoner may have committed _some_ offence against law, you are, therefore, to discard all scruples and find him guilty of _this_ offence, I regard as treason against justice, as a monstrous perversion of judicial proceedings; yes, as a thousand times worse than any guilt of the prisoner, even supposing the distorted features of the picture, drawn by the government’s counsel, to be genuine. It would be nothing less than Lynch law, perpetrated by twelve picked and sworn men, instead of a mob.

Gentlemen, the district attorney in his opening has not deigned to tell us on what law he proceeds. He has accused the prisoner of stealing often enough, but has read no statute, and referred to no decision, which creates or describes any such offence. Hence a task which clearly belonged to him is devolved upon me.

After the District of Columbia was ceded to the United States, Congress passed a general law, adopting the laws of Maryland, for that part of the District which had been ceded by Maryland. This trial, therefore, must proceed upon laws originally passed by Maryland. By the act of 1737, ch. 2, § 4, it is provided that any person “who shall steal any negro or other slave,” “or who shall counsel, hire, aid, abet, or command any person or persons” to do so, shall suffer death as a felon. The punishment has since been changed to imprisonment in the United States prison, for a term of not less than seven, nor more than twenty years. [Here comments were made at length on the preamble of the statute, and the class of cases to which the law was intended to apply.]

This act was designed to prevent slaves from being _stolen_. But a man might lose a slave without his being stolen. The slave might be enticed or persuaded to run away. Experience, doubtless, made the masters aware of this. Hence, fourteen years afterwards, by the act of 1751, ch. 14, § 10, it was provided that “if any person shall entice and persuade any slave within this province to run away, and who shall actually run away from the master,” &c., he shall be punished, &c.

But there was still another way of depriving a master of the service of his slave. Hence the act of 1796, ch. 67, § 19, made it a separate and distinct offence for any person to be guilty of “the transporting of any slave or person, held to service,” from the state.