[25]
[Footnote 25: Rebecca Rhame _vs_. James Ferguson and John R. Dangerfield,
in Rice, _Law Reports of South Carolina_, I, 196-203.]
This is the melodrama which the sober court record recites. The female
villain of the piece and her craven henchman were foiled by the sturdy
but wily trustee and the doughty Carolina colonel who, in headlong,
aristocratic championship of those threatened with oppression against
the moral sense of the community, charged upon the scene and counseled
slaughter if necessary in defense of negroes who were none of his. And
in the end the magistrates and jurors, proving second Daniels come to
judgment, endorsed the victory of benevolence over avarice and assured
the so-called slaves their thinly veiled freedom. Curiously, however, the
decision in this case was instanced by a contemporary traveller to prove
that negroes freed by will in South Carolina might be legally enslaved by
any person seizing them, and that the bequest of slaves in trust to an
executor as a merely nominal master was contrary to law;[26] and in later
times a historian has instanced the traveller's account in support of his
own statement that "Persons who had been set free for years and had no
reason to suppose that they were anything else might be seized upon for
defects in the legal process of manumission.
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