We have seen that the slave has no legal property in his own body. It is almost unnecessary to say, that he has no property in any thing else,--that all his acquisitions belong, like himself, to his master. He is, in fact, a chattel. We should rather say, that to serve the purpose of rapacity and tyranny, he is alternately considered as real and as personal property. He may be sold or bequeathed at the pleasure of his master, he may be put up to auction by process of law, for {307}the benefit of the creditors or legatees of his master. In either of these ways he may be, in a moment, torn for ever from his home, his associates, his own children. He is, in addition to this, legally a subject of mortgages, demises, leases, settlements in tail, in remainder, and in reversion. The practice of raising money on this species of property, is favoured by the laws of all the Colonies, and has been equally fatal to the owner and to the slave. It is fatal to the owner, because it enables him to risk capital not his own, in the precarious lottery of the West Indian sugar trade. It is fatal to the slave, because, in the first place, while it leaves to the master all his power to oppress, it deprives him of his power to manumit; and secondly, because it leads the master to keep possession of his Negroes, and to compel them to labour, when he has no prospect of holding them long, and is therefore naturally inclined to make as much by them, and to spend as little upon them as possible,--a fact amply proved by the miserable state in which the gang is generally found, when transferred from the ruined planter to the half ruined mortgagee. Such is the legal condition of the Negro, considered with reference to his master. We shall proceed to examine into the nature of the relation in which he stands towards free persons in general.