It was by Justice Clarke, in reviewing an appeal by a white man who had killed a slave in Adams county and been sentenced to hang therefor. He said in part, "In some respects slaves may be considered as chattels, but in others they are regarded as men. The law views them as capable of committing crimes. This can only be upon the principle that they are men and rational beings. The Roman law has been much relied on by counsel for the defendant. That law was confined to the Roman Empire, giving the power of life and death over captives in war, as slaves, but it no more extended here than did the similar power given to parents over the lives of their children.... At a very early period in Virginia the power of life over slaves was given by statute, but ... as soon as these statutes were repealed it was at once considered by their courts that the killing of a slave might be murder.... In this state the Legislature have considered slaves as reasonable and accountable beings, and it would be a stigma upon the character of the state, and a reproach to the administration of justice if the life of a slave could be taken with impunity,--if he could be murdered in cold blood, without subjecting the offender to the highest penalty known to the criminal jurisprudence of the county. Has the slave no rights because he is deprived of his freedom? He is still a human being, and possesses all those rights of which he is not deprived by the positive provisions of the law,--but in vain shall we look for any law passed by the enlightened and philanthropic legislature of this state giving to the master power over the life of the slave. Such a statute would be worthy the age of Wraco or Caligula, and would be condemned by the unanimous voice of the people of this state, where cruelty, even, to slaves, much less the taking away of life, meets with universal reprobation.... Because slaves can be bought and sold it does not follow that they can be deprived of life.... The right of the master exists not by force of the law of nature or of nations, but by virtue only of the positive law of the state,--and, although that gives to the master the right to command the services of the slave, requiring the master to feed and clothe the slave from infancy till death, yet it gives the master no right to take the life of the slave, and if the offense be not murder it is not a crime, and subjects the offender to no punishment.... A distinction once existed in England between the killing of a Dane and a Saxon, but even in Coke's time the killing of any rational being was murder.... At one period of the Roman history, a history written in the blood of vanquished nations, slaves were regarded as captives, whose lives had been spared in battle, and the savage conqueror might take away the life of the captive, and therefore he might take away the life of the slave. But the civil law of Rome extirpated this barbarous privilege, and rendered the killing of a slave a capital offense. When