On the record
Why did it not provide for the capture of a fugitive horse or ox?
Source
gutenberg.orgEditor's note · Context
Mann questions the absence of legal provisions for the capture of escaped livestock, using it to critique the focus on fugitive slaves.
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Behind these forty-one indictments for stealing stand drawn up, in battle array, against this same prisoner, seventy-four other indictments for transporting the very slaves whom he is charged to have stolen.
So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness.
Old Virginia was the first to sow this land of ours with slavery; she is also the first to reap the full harvest of destruction.
And yet, infinitely flagrant as the anomaly is, the slave is amenable to the laws of the land for all offences which he may commit against others, though he is powerless to protect himself by the same law from offences which others may…
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