of
forfeiting the sum of fifty pounds; one moiety thereof to her Majesty,
for and toward the support of the Government within this province, and
the other moiety to him or them that shall inform and sue for the same
in any of her Majesty's courts of record within the province, by bill,
plaint, or information."

We give both of these laws in the words used by the respective
legislative bodies, because the language in which they are framed, as
well as the provisions contained in them, show, too plainly to be
misunderstood, the degraded condition of this unhappy race. They were
still in force when the Revolution began, and are a faithful index to
the state of feeling toward the class of persons of whom they speak, and
of the position they occupied throughout the thirteen colonies, in the
eyes and thoughts of the men who framed the Declaration of Independence
and established the State Constitutions and Governments. They show that
a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between
the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery, and
governed as subjects with absolute and despotic power, and which they
then looked upon as so far below them in the scale of created beings,
that intermarriages between white persons and negroes or mulattoes were
regarded as unnatural and immoral, and punished as crimes, not only in
the parties, but in the person who joined them in marriage. And no
distinction in this respect was made between the free negro or mulatto
and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed
upon the whole race.

We refer to these historical facts for the purpose of showing the fixed
opinions concerning that race, upon which the statesmen of that day
spoke and acted. It is necessary to do this, in order to determine
whether the general terms used in the Constitution of the United States,
as to the rights of man and the rights of the people, was intended to
include them, or to give to them or their posterity the benefit of any
of its provisions.

The language of the Declaration of Independence is equally conclusive:

It begins by declaring "that when in the course of human events it
becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which
have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the
earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and
nature's God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind
requ