Finally, affecting slaves and colored freemen somewhat alike, and
regardless as usual of any distinction of mulattoes or quadroons from the
full-blood negroes, there were manifold restraints of a social character
buttressing the predominance and the distinctive privileges of the
Caucasian caste.
[Footnote 16: _E. g_., Jones, _North Carolina Supreme Court Reports_, VI.
272.]
It may fairly be said that these laws for the securing of slave property
and the police of the colored population were as thorough and stringent as
their framers could make them, and that they left an almost irreducible
minimum of rights and privileges to those whose function and place were
declared to be service and subordination. But in fairness it must also
be said that in adopting this legislation the Southern community largely
belied itself, for whereas the laws were systematically drastic the
citizens in whose interest they were made and in whose hands their
enforcement lay were in practice quite otherwise. It would have required a
European bureaucracy to keep such laws fully effective; the individualistic
South was incapable of the task. If the regulations were seldom relaxed in
the letter they were as rarely enforced in the spirit.
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