d according to
conscience--the legislature has power to specify each of these
acts--declare that it is not "_humane_ treatment," and PROHIBIT it.--The
legislature may also believe that driving men and women into the field,
and forcing them to work without pay as long as they live, is not
"humane treatment," and being constitutionally bound "to _oblige_"
masters to practise "humane treatment"--they have the _power_ to
_prohibit such_ treatment, and are bound to do it.

[Footnote A: Law of North Carolina, Haywood's Manual, 524-5.]

[Footnote B: Law of Louisiana, Martin's Digest, 610.]

The law of Louisiana makes slaves real estate, prohibiting the holder,
if he be also a _land_ holder, to separate them from the soil.[C] If it
has power to prohibit the sale _without_ the soil, it can prohibit the
sale _with_ it; and if it can prohibit the _sale_ as property, it can
prohibit the _holding_ as property. Similar laws exist in the French,
Spanish, and Portuguese colonies.

[Footnote C: Virginia made slaves real estate by a law passed in 1705.
(_Beverly's Hist. of Va._, p. 98.) I do not find the precise time when
this law was repealed, probably when Virginia became the chief slave
breeder for the cotton-growing and sugar-planting country, and made
young men and women "from fifteen to twenty-five" the main staple
production of the State.]

The law of Louisiana requires the master to give his slaves a certain
amount of food and clothing, (_Martin's Digest_, 610.) If it can oblige
the master to give the slave _one_ thing, it can oblige him to give him
another: if food and clothing, then wages, liberty, his own body. Such
laws exist in most slaveholding governments.

By the slave laws of Connecticut, under which slaves are now held, (for
even Connecticut is still a slave State,) slaves might receive and hold
property, and prosecute suits in their own name as plaintiffs: [This
last was also the law of Virginia in 1795. See Tucker's "Dissertation on
Slavery," p. 73.] There were also laws making marriage contracts legal,
in certain contingencies, and punishing infringements of them,
["_Reeve's Law of Baron and Femme_," p. 310-1.] Each of the laws
enumerated above, does, _in principle_, abolish slavery; and all of them
together abolish it _in fact_. True, not as a _whole_, and at a
_stroke_, nor all in one place; but in its _parts_, by piecemeal, at
divers times and places; thus showing that the abolition of slavery is
within t