It is also an outrageous misrepresentation to say that our laws imposed no check upon the master's brutality in punishing, and took away the slave's natural right of self-defence. The slave whose life was assailed might exercise the natural right of self-defence, even against his own master. He did it, of course, under the same responsibility to the law, and the same risque of guilt, if it should appear that he had shed blood gratuitously in a moment of ill-justified passion, under which the white man acts. Cases actually adjudicated have clearly ascertained this principle. In the county of----,[79] a slave, in the year 1861, turned upon his master during harvest, and with his scythe inflicted a mortal wound. He was arrested by his own fellow-slaves, and when questioned, replied to one, "I intended to kill him;" and to another, "I tried to cut him in two." It was proved by the defence, at his trial, (through the exclusive testimony of blacks,) that his master had, on previous days, and also on the morning of the same day, two hours previously, harassed him with barbarous and unusual punishments, by which, although none of them even in appearance assailed life, a just sense of outrage and high indignation must have been produced. The grave defect of this defence was, that the assaults of the master, although barbarous, never had implicated life, and that two or more hours had intervened, for the cooling of passion. The only immediate provocation at the time of killing was the repetition of some words of rebuke, with a comparatively slight chastisement. Such was the case. The court decided that, on the one hand, a verdict of justifiable homicide could not be given in the slave's favour, because the lawful present provocation was absent; but on the other, that it was not murder, because the barbarities which had preceded the act justified resentment. The crime was therefore ascertained as a mitigated homicide, with a milder punishment. [Footnote 79: Names and places are suppressed in this publick statement, for obvious reasons of regard for meritorious survivors. But the official records are at hand, and will be furnished any gainsayer.]