Letters of Lydia Maria Child, with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier and an appendix by Wendell Phillips.

128 LETTERS.
whatsoever." This, of course, involves the right to
sell his children, as if they were pigs; also, to take
his wife from him "for any intent or purpose whatsoever." Your laws also make it death for him to
resist a white man, however brutally he may be
treated, or however much his family may be outraged
before his eyes. If he attempts to run away, your
laws allow any man to shoot him.
By your laws, all a slave's earnings belong to his
master. He can neither receive donations nor transmit property. If his master allows him some hours
to work for himself, and by great energy and perseverance he earns enough to buy his own bones and
sinews, his master may make him pay two or three
times over, and he has no redress. Three such cases
have come within my own knowledge. Even a written promise from his master has no legal value, because a slave can make no contracts.
Your laws also systematically aim at keeping the
minds of the colored people in the most abject state
of ignorance. If white people attempt to teach them
to read or write, they are punished by imprisonment
or fines; if they attempt to teach each other, they
are punished with from twenty to thirty-nine lashles
each. It cannot be said that the anti-slavery agitation produced such laws, for they date much farther
back; many of them when we were Provinces. They
are the necessities of the system, which, being itself
an outrage upon human nature, can be sustained
only by perpetual outrages.
The next reliable source of information is the adver.
tisements in the Southern papers. In the North Carolina (Raleigh) s" Standard," Mr. Micajah Ricks advertises, " Runaway, a negro womzan and two children.