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Chapter 24. Inequality of Justice 531
the law as well as the status of property, it was the latter viewpoint which,
in practice, became the determining one. In the very relationship between
master and slave it was inherent that—^without recourse to courts—force
and bodily punishment and, under certain circumstances, even the killing
of the slave was allowed. “. . . all slaveholders are under the shield of a
perpetual license to murder,” exclaimed Hinton R. Helper in his unsparing
onslaught on the plantation class and the slavery institution.^* Thomas
Jefferson saw clearly the moral danger of the slavery institution:
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the
most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and
degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to Imitate it. . , .
The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by
such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who,
permitting one half the citizens to trample on the rights of the other, transforming
those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of one part, and the
amor fatriae of the other. . . . [Can] the liberties of a nation be thought secure
when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people
that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with
His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that
His justice cannot sleep forever.”^®
Most states, however, inaugurated statutes to protect the slave from
unnecessary sufferings.^* The master was obliged to provide food, clothing,
and shelter, and to treat his slaves humanly. To the extent that these regu-
lations were not sanctioned by the master’s own economic interests and his
feelings for his human property or by community sentiment, they seem
not to have been enforced. The slave could generally not testify against
a white man, and the white community was too much in collusion to per-
mit the vindication of the slave’s rights against his master. Considering the
intensive criticisms of slavery laws and of the treatment of slaves which
emanated from Abolitionist circles in the North—^there are several learned
treatises in the ’forties and ’fifties supporting the popular propaganda*®
—
it is perhaps surprising that the Southern states did not build up a defense
for their peculiar institution by legislating modernized slave codes, legal-
izing the humanized views which were expressed in the apologetic litera-
ture on slavery and, without doubt, even acted upon most of the time by
the majority of slave owners.**
Most of the laws relating to the slavery institution were, instead, aimed
at regulating in detail the behavior of the slaves, forbidding them to
possess or carry weapons, to resist white persons, to assemble in the absence
of whites, to leave the plantation without permission. Even those regula-
tions seem not to have been enforced with too much rigidity as it was
commonly left to the slave master, in whose interest they were enacted, to
supervise his own slaves as he wished. Since all whites enjoyed a superior
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