Those laws were enacted for the most part in
seasons of particular alarm produced by attempts at insurrection, or when
the black inhabitants were doubly formidable by reason of the greater
proportion which they bore to the whites in number and the savage state and
unhappy mood in which they arrived from Africa. The real measure of danger
was not understood but after long experience, and in the interval the
precautions taken were naturally of the most jealous and rigorous aspect.
That these have not all been repealed, or that some of them should be still
enforced, is not inconsistent with an improved spirit of legislation, since
the evils against which they were intended to guard are yet the subject of
just apprehension."[8]
[Footnote 7: _Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture, or a Defence of the West
India Planters_. By a West Indian (Philadelphia, 1773), p. 18, note.]
[Footnote 8: Robert Walsh, Jr., _An Appeal from the Judgments of Great
Britain respecting the United States of America_ (Philadelphia, 1819), p.
405.]
Wherever colonial statutes were silent the laws of the mother country
filled the gap. It was under the common law of England, for example, that
the slaves Mark and Phillis were tried in Massachusetts in 1755 for
the poisoning of their master, duly convicted of petit treason, and
executed--the woman as the principal in the crime by being burned at the
stake, the man as an accessory by being hanged and his body thereafter
left for years hanging in chains on Charlestown common.
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