[9] The severity of
Anglo-American legislation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
furthermore, was in full accord with the tone of contemporary English
criminal law. It is not clear, however, that the great mitigation which
benefit of clergy gave in English criminal administration[10] was
commensurately applied in the colonies when slave crimes were concerned.
Even in England, indeed, servants were debarred in various regards, that of
petit treason, for example, from this avenue of relief. On the other hand
many American slaves were saved from death at the hands of the law by the
tolerant spirit of citizens toward them and by the consideration of the
pecuniary loss to be suffered through their execution. A Jamaican statute
of 1684 went so far as to prescribe that when several slaves were jointly
involved in a capital crime one only was to be executed as an example and
the loss caused by his death was to be apportioned among the owners of the
several.[11] More commonly the mitigation lay not in the laws themselves
but in the general disposition to leave to the discipline of the masters
such slave misdeeds as were not regarded as particularly heinous nor
menacing to the public security.
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