If an ox gores a manservant or a maidservant, the owner of the ox is to pay thirty shekels of silver to the owner of the servant: but besides this, the ox is to be stoned. The value of the latter enactment is that it asserts the sanctity of the servant’s life: the ox is to be put out of the way as an accursed thing because it has shed the blood of man. Too much stress can scarcely be laid on this when we consider that the Hebrew lawgiver is dealing with a barbarous nation, and introducing into their rude hearts the first principles of civilization.
“I do not think,” says Mr. Olmsted, “that I have ever seen the sudden death of a negro noticed in a Southern newspaper, or heard it referred to in conversation, that the loss of property, rather than the extinction of life, was not the evident occasion of interest.”[1]
We have no trace in the criminal law of Moses or in Hebrew history of the infliction upon the slave of any cruel or servile kind of punishment from which freemen were exempt, such as the punishment of crucifixion among the Romans, or such as the punishment of burning alive, which has been sometimes inflicted on slaves, and but for the indignant protests of civilized humanity, might perhaps be still more often inflicted on them, in the Southern States. The Hebrew
- ↑ A Journey in the Back Country, p. 63. Mr. Olmsted quotes some paragraphs, one of which (from The Rogersville Times,) is, “Mr. Tilghman Cobb’s barn at Bedford, Va., was set fire to by lightning on Friday, the 11th, and consumed. Two negroes and three horses perished in the flames.”
