Excerpt from A Brief Notice of American Slavery, and the Abolition Movement The hopeless condition of the Slave, both as regards his men tal improvement, and his eventual restoration to his rights as a man, may be judged of by a bare mention of a few of the laws of the Southern States. These laws somewhat vary in the different States; but the following will be found in some or other of them. Teaching Slaves to read is prohibited under severe penalties, fines and imprisonment, and especially if the free coloured peo ple presume to teach: in Louisiana, death is the legal penalty for the second offence. A father may be flogged for teaching his own child to read the Bible.* Religious assemblies of Slaves are illegal; they may be broken up, and the negroes flogged without trial for being present. The law affords no protection to the marriage of Slaves; masters may at any time enforce a separation between husband and wife. If a free coloured man enter a Southern port on ship board, he is liable to be taken to prison and kept there until the ship sails away; and if the cap tain should fail to pay the expences incurred by his detention, the coloured man is liable to be sold to perpetual Slavery. As sisting Slaves to escape is an offence visited with severe penalties, such as long imprisonment, heavy fines, branding with a hot iron, the pillory, and even death. In Mississippi Slaves are punished capitally for thirty different crimes, all of which in the case of whites are visited only with fine and imprisonment; eight of them, if committed by whites, are not punishable at all. All the Slave States allow the life of a fugitive Slave to be taken, if his escape cannot otherwise be prevented. A Slave, refusing to submit to the lash, may be legally shot. If a Slave be killed by cruel whipping, the master is liable to a fine, or to imprisonment for six months; but as Slave testi mony is not received in evidence, the commission of the offence cannot be proved against masters, if none but negroes were present at the time. However injured a Slave may be by per sonal violence, he cannot prosecute his master, or any one else, for damages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.