“Every decade exhibits a rapid and fearful increase of this mass of ignorance. In 1840, the number of the unlettered in Virginia amounted to sixty thousand. In 1850, it exceeded eighty thousand. At this rate, it will not require many centuries to extinguish all knowledge of letters in the State.”
Here is a fact that every Virginian should ponder well. There is no doubt as to the data, and less as to the result, unless something is done at once to stay this doward current. Let them study the real cause of this state of things, and not attribute it to any but the right one. Is the way to remove the evil properly commenced by imprisoning a woman for teaching a few little children to read? Again I say, oh, most righteous Judge!
But the hardihood of Judge Baker was evinced in his using the language quoted, when he knew that his most intimate friends, and even members of his own family had been and were engaged in doing with impunity what in me was a crime. How he can reconcile his treatment of me with his conscience, when he remembers this fact, is best known to himself. Probably his usual admirable logic will help him out of the dilemma. I am sure I cannot.
The learned Judge grows remarkably religious as he proceeds. He admits that “the slave population of the South are peculiarly susceptible of good religious influences.” He even dares to say that “their mere residence among a Christian people has wrought a great and happy change in their condition: they have been raised from the night of Heathenism to the light of Christianity, and thousands of them have been brought to a saving knowledge of the Gospel. Of the one hundred millions of the negro race, there cannot be found another so large a body as the three millions of slaves in the United States, at once so intelligent, so inclined to the Gospel, and so blest by the elevating influences of civilization and Christianity.” Allow me, oh wonderful judge! to ask you one simple question, which I much fear even your logic will be puzzled to answer. If such be the character and condition of the slave population, and the more, (as by your own showing,) they become acquainted with the principles of the Gospel, the more they conform to them, how is it that you regard as a crime, the giving them the instruction necessary to accomplish this purpose? Which horn of this dilemma will your Honor choose to be impaled upon? Sorry am I to be compelled to contradict a professed gentleman, but your Honor knew that you were telling an untruth when you uttered that sentence, and you knew also the cause of the misery and degradation among Southern slaves, producing as it does a state of things which may well lead you to fear to have them instructed in any thing. I know that cause, also, and I am going to tell it boldly to my Southern brothers and sisters before I close my present labor.
You are pleased to term the exercise of the commonest dictates of humanity in me a “sickly sensibility” towards the colored race. Be it so. But I require the aid of no physician to heal me, and rather, would to God that my disease were contagious, and that I could therewith infect the entire South. A little portion of the virus might perhaps not be unavailable even in your veins. If it be a “sickly sensibility” to yearn to impart to immortal souls, that instruction necessary to guide them through life and upwards towards heaven, I confess that I am guilty. This is the head and front of my offending—no less—no more.
The decision admits that the enactment under which I suffered was not to be found in the original code of Virginia, but the result of the experience and wisdom of the later inhabitants of that State. Certainly, the framers of the original laws of the old Commonwealth were men of too much sense and foresight, too Christian, too civilized, too human, to incorporate such a disgraceful law into their rules of government. That task was left to their degenerate sons of the present decade, and even then it could not be accomplished until eighty thousand of them had returned into that mental obscurity that characterized the dark ages. The law, on its very face, indicates that it was not the offspring of men of intelligence or common prudence. Any law declaring that any portion of human beings shall be denied the benefits of education, must spring from ignorance and error, and must inevitably lead to the same results universally. The defender of such a law voluntarily classes himself with those who made it, and those against whom it especially operates. Such a man is the Honorable Richard H. Baker.
The next paragraph of this venerable decision is so strangely constructed that I hardly know what to say of it. The Judge literally foams at the mouth and presents sad symptoms of hydrophobia. The expressions “Northern incendiaries,” “anti-slavery fury,” “inflammatory documents,” “cut-throats,” “Northern fanatics,” “anti-slavery nonsense,” &c., make up the entire paragraph. His Honor grows pale over a poor little inoffensive piece of muslin, with a picture upon it which he denominates “frightful.” He succeeds in working himself into a perfect fury, and about what? With nothing that I can see with which I, or the question before him, had anything to do. I was not a Northern incendiary or fanatic, nor did I distribute any inflammatory documents or anti-slavery nonsense. I was a Southern woman, in every sense of the word, and he knew it. I used no books, except the Bible, or those which illustrated it, and he knew this also. The only escape for his honor is that he denounces the Bible as an inflammatory or incendiary document, and as such must not be taught to the slaves.
The Judge next regrets that I am a woman, for the modicum of gentlemanly honor and dignity which he has left, prevents him from exercising the full bent of his inclinations, and inflicting upon me the full penalty of the violated law. It is a pity he remembered that I was of the weaker sex, and I feel that I have no thanks to offer him for his proposed lenity, for, under the circumstances of the case, an imprisonment for six months would have been no severer than the one for thirty days. He admits that the jury had the power to regulate the amount of the fine, but claims that it was his prerogative to name the term of my imprisonment. The jury, it will be seen, made the fine merely nominal, thus attesting in the most emphatic manner their appreciation of the merits of the case. There was not a man on that jury who was not fully as capable of judging of right and wrong, as was he who occupied the bench. And yet he, this one man, had the hardihood to set his judgment over theirs, and virtually insult the whole twelve, by inflicting a punishment so severe that it was no charity to me not to have exercised his power to the fullest extent. He admits that I was of fair and respectable standing in the community, and knew from the evidence, as well as from his own knowledge, that I had abundant precedents for what I had done, and that, knowing the law, I had no intention of again violating it; also, that the feeling of the entire community was in my favor, and yet he wantonly, needlessly, and inhumanly exercised the authority with which he was clothed, in order to make an example of me, when I, by my forbearance, had refused to place scores of respectable ladies and gentlemen of Norfolk, and some of them members of his own family, in the unpleasant position which I then occupied. He even twitted me because I had not deemed it proper to employ counsel to defend me, intimating that my case would have been presented in a more favorable light to the Court and jury thereby. This shows the very blackness of his malice, for the jury did all they could, and I do not entertain the least feeling of anger towards one of them. They could not do otherwise than find me guilty of a violation of the law, as it stood, but they did all in their power to render its penalty nominal, by imposing upon me the lowest fine it recognized. It was the Judge himself who insulted the jury by virtually telling them their judgment was erroneous, and then he turns to me and says my case might have been more favorably presented if I had employed counsel!
The conclusion is obvious, that he was actuated, not by a desire to uphold the law and administer justice, but by some motive alike discreditable to him as a Judge and a man. With this conclusion, I leave him to settle with his own conscience. I have no disposition to call him hard names. He has done me all the injury he could, and though I may forgive him, I am satisfied that he never can forgive himself, or escape from the doom to which he has already been sentenced by every sensible and right thinking person in the community. Honorable Richard H. Baker, Judge of the Circuit Court of the City of Norfolk, I bid you an affectionate farewell.
I will here give to my readers a verbatim copy of the law under which I was prosecuted and convicted. It is copied from the code of Virginia, passed by the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the month of August, 1849, and will be found on page 747, chapter 198. It reads as follows:—