tled mainly by slaveholders
and others, who were natives of slave states, in contrast with other
parts of these states settled almost exclusively by persons from free
states; that affrays and breaches of the peace are far more frequent
in the former than in the latter, is well known to all.

We now proceed to the remaining slave states. Those that have not yet
been considered, are Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South
Carolina, Georgia, and the territory of Florida. As Delaware has
hardly two thousand five hundred slaves, arbitrary power over human
beings is exercised by so few persons, that the turbulence infused
thereby into the public mind is but an inconsiderable element, quite
insufficient to inflame the passions, much less to cast the character
of the mass of the people; consequently, the state of society there,
and the general security of life is but little less than in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania, upon which states it borders on the north and east.
The same causes operate in a considerable measure, though to a much
less extent to Maryland and in Northern and Western Virginia. But in
lower Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, the
general state of society as it respects the successful triumph of
passion over law, and the consequent and universal insecurity of life
is, in the main, very similar to that of the states already
considered. In some portions of each of these states, human life has
probably as little real protection as in Arkansas, Mississippi and
Louisiana; but generally throughout the former states and sections,
the laws are not so absolutely powerless as in the latter three.
Deadly affrays, duels, murders, lynchings, &c., are, in proportion to
the white population, as frequent and as rarely punished in lower
Virginia as in Kentucky and Missouri; in North Carolina and South
Carolina as in Tennessee; and in Georgia and Florida as in Alabama.

To insert the criminal statistics of the remaining slave states in
detail, as those of the states already considered have been presented,
would, we find, fill more space than can well be spared. Instead of
this, we propose to exhibit the state of society in all the
slaveholding region bordering on the Atlantic, by the testimony of the
slaveholders themselves, corroborated by a few plain facts. Leaving
out of view Florida, where law is the _most_ powerless, and Maryland
where probably it is the _least_ so, we propose to select as a fair