he came into
my employment, I might have been wholly unable to show
them. Is it not possible to suppose a great number of
circumstances under which these slaves of Houver left
their master's service and came on board the Pearl,
without any agency on the part of this prisoner? Now,
the government might positively disprove and exclude
forty such suppositions; but, so long as one remained
which was not excluded, you cannot find a verdict of
conviction. The government is to prove that the prisoner
enticed and seduced these negroes, and you have no right
to presume he did so unless every other possible
explanation of the case is positively excluded by the
testimony. Is it so extravagant a supposition that Mr.
Foote's speech, and the other torch-light speeches
heretofore alluded to, heard by these slaves, or
communicated to them, might have so wrought upon their
minds as to induce them to leave their masters? I don't
say that they had any right to suppose that these
declamations about universal emancipation had any
reference to them. I am a southern man, and I hold to
the southern doctrine. I admit that there is no
inconsistency between perfect civil liberty and holding
people of another race in domestic servitude. But then
it is natural that these people should overlook this
distinction, however obvious and important. Nor do they
lack wit to apply these speeches to their own case or
interest in such matters. I myself have a slave as quick
to see distinctions as I am, and who would have made a
better lawyer if he had had the same advantages. It came
out the other day, in a trial in this court, that the
colored people have debating-societies among themselves.
It was an assault and battery case; one of the
disputants, in the heat of the argument, struck the
other; but then they have precedents for that in the
House of Representatives. Is it an impossible, or
improbable, or a disproved supposition, that a number of
slaves, having agreed together to desert their masters,
or having concerted such a plan with somebody here,
Drayton was employed to come and take them away, and
that he received them on board without ever having seen
one of them? If his confessions are to be taken at all,
they are to be taken together; and do they not tend to
prove such a stat