The Chief Justice Sharkey who pronounced this decision is stated by the Evening Post to have been a principal agent in the passage of the severe law under which this horrible inhumanity was perpetrated.
Nothing more forcibly shows the absolute despotism of the slave-law over all the kindest feelings and intentions of the master, and the determination of courts to carry these severities to their full lengths, than this cruel deed, which precipitated a young man who had been educated to consider himself free, and his mother, an educated woman, back into the bottomless abyss of slavery. Had this case been chosen for the theme of a novel, or a tragedy, the world would have cried out upon it as a plot of monstrous improbability. As it stands in the law-book, it is only a specimen of that awful kind of truth, stranger than fiction, which is all the time evolving, in one form or another, from the workings of this anomalous system.
This view of the subject is a very important one, and ought to be earnestly and gravely pondered by those in foreign countries, who are too apt to fasten their condemnation and opprobrium rather on the person of the slave-holder than on the horrors of the legal system. In some slave states it seems as if there was very little that the benevolent owner could do which should permanently benefit his slave, unless he should seek to alter the laws. Here it is that the highest obligation of the Southern Christian lies. Nor will the world or God hold them guiltless who, with the elective franchise in their hands, and the full power to speak, write and discuss, suffer this monstrous system of legalized cruelty to go on from age to age.
[16]. In and after the reign of Augustus, certain restrictive regulations were passed, designed to prevent an increase of unworthy citizens by emancipation. They had, however, nothing like the stringent force of American laws.
[17]. i. e. Periagua.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE HEBREW SLAVE-LAW COMPARED WITH THE AMERICAN SLAVE-LAW.
Having compared the American law with the Roman, we will now compare it with one other code of slave-laws, to wit, the Hebrew.
This comparison is the more important, because American slavery has been defended on the ground of God’s permitting Hebrew slavery.
The inquiry now arises, What kind of slavery was it that was permitted among the Hebrews? for in different nations very different systems have been called by the general name of slavery.