By a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1822),
pp. 84, 85.]
[Footnote 90: E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 158.]
[Footnote 91: Letter to the editor in the _Louisiana Gazette_, Aug. 12,
1819.]
CHAPTER XXII
SLAVE CRIME
The negroes were in a strange land, coercively subjected to laws and
customs far different from those of their ancestral country; and by being
enslaved and set off into a separate lowly caste they were largely deprived
of that incentive to conformity which under normal conditions the hope of
individual advancement so strongly gives. It was quite to be expected that
their conduct in general would be widely different from that of the whites
who were citizens and proprietors. The natural amenability of the blacks,
however, had been a decisive factor in their initial enslavement, and the
reckoning which their captors and rulers made of this was on the whole well
founded. Their lawbreaking had few distinctive characteristics, and gave no
special concern to the public except as regards rape and revolt.
Records of offenses by slaves are scant because on the one hand they were
commonly tried by somewhat informal courts whose records are scattered and
often lost, and on the other hand they were generally given sentences
of whipping, death or deportation, which kept their names out of the
penitentiary lists.
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