liberties of the freedman were at the same time cleared of all odious and injurious restrictions. This remained the policy of the Christian Empire. The Code of Justinian, the great monument of Imperial jurisprudence, is highly favourable to enfranchisement, and that on religious grounds.
The facility of enfranchisement, and the prospect of enlarging that facility, would conspire with political prudence to prevent Christianity from coming into direct collision with Roman slavery. Hope was not denied to the Roman slave. But hope is denied, or almost denied, to the American slave. In most of the Southern States the law withholds the power of enfranchisement from the master, against whose benevolence and generosity it seems the State is more concerned to guard, than against his cruelty and lust. A slave can be emancipated only by the authority of the Legislature or by a Court of Law, and upon special cause shewn; and further, the condition of a Negro when emancipated is such, as to make freedom at once a very qualified and a very precarious boon. The free Negro is still to a great extent excluded from the rights of a citizen and a man. His evidence is not received against a white man;[1] the law does not secure to him the safeguard of a trial by a jury of his peers; he has no vote or voice in framing the laws by which he is governed, and degrading restrictions are imposed even
- ↑ “It is an inflexible and universal rule of slave-law, founded in one or two States upon usage, in others sanctioned by express legislation, that the testimony of a coloured person, whether bond or free, cannot be received against a white person.”—Wheeler’s Law of Slavery, quoted by Goodell, p. 279.
