(7.) In South Carolina there appears to have been no statute expressly excluding the testimony of a slave against a white person, although the early Act of 1740, § 39, necessarily implies this exclusion.[32] But the rule was autochthonous. It sprang from the soil without statute. Judge O’Neall, in an Essay on the Slave Laws, declares that “a slave cannot testify, except as against another slave, free negro, mulatto, or mestizo, and that without oath.”[33] But the exclusion did not bear merely upon slaves. The judge announces that “free negroes, mulattoes, and mestizoes cannot be witnesses or jurors in the superior courts; … they cannot even be witnesses in inferior courts, with the single exception of a magistrate’s and freeholder’s court, trying slaves or free negroes, mulattoes or mestizoes, for criminal offences, and then without oath.”[34] It appears that the Act of 1740, §§ 13, 14, on which this custom was founded, applies only to free Indians and slaves;[35] so that, strictly, free negroes, mulattoes, and mestizoes are not despoiled of their right at Common Law to be heard under oath, but the uniform practice under the Act, according to the judge, has been otherwise.[36] On another occasion, another judge of South Carolina says: “There is no instance in which a negro has been permitted to give evidence, except in cases of absolute and indispensable necessity; nor, indeed, has this court ever recognized the propriety of admitting them in any case where the rights of white persons were concerned.”[37] In still another case it was decided that a free person of color is not competent in any case in a court of record, although both parties are of the same class with himself.[38] The rule thus rigorously declared has given rise to some strange illustrations. Thus, for instance, in a suit to recover certain slaves as part of a gang named, evidence was admitted that other negroes of the defendant were accustomed to speak of those in question as belonging to the gang.[39] In another case, where the book of a tradesman was made up from the entries of a negro workman on a slate, and notice was affixed to the door of the shop that all credits there would be charged according to the negro’s entries, the Court doubted whether the book could be evidence at all,--but if at all, only as to the amount of work done, and then only against a person otherwise proved to be a customer.[40]