[Will You Buy Me, Sir?]); The Privilege Of Marrying According To His Own Inclination; The Possibility Of Purchasing His Liberty*

By his labour (* A slave in the Spanish colonies ought, according to law, to be estimated at the lowest price;

This estimate, at the time of my journey, was, according to the locality, from 200 to 380 piastres. In 1825 the price of an adult negro at the island of Cuba, was 450 piastres. In 1788 the French trade furnished a negro for 280 to 300 piastres. A slave among the Greeks cost 300 to 600 drachmes (54 to 108 piastres), when the day-labourer was paid one-tenth of a piastre. While the Spanish laws and institutions favour manumission in every way, the master, in the other islands, pays the fiscal, for every freed slave, five to seven hundred piastres!), and of paying, with an acquired property, for the liberty of his wife and children.* (* What a contrast is observable between the humanity of the most ancient Spanish laws concerning slavery, and the traces of barbarism found in every page of the Black Code and in some of the provincial laws of the English islands! The laws of Barbadoes, made in 1686, and those of Bermuda, in 1730, decreed that the master who killed his negro in chastising him, could not even be sued, while the master who killed his slave wilfully should pay ten pounds sterling to the royal treasury. A law of saint Christopher's, of March 11th, 1784, begins with these words: "Whereas some persons have of late been guilty of cutting off and depriving slaves of their ears, we order that whoever shall extirpate an eye, tear out the tongue, or cut off the nose of a slave, shall pay five hundred pounds sterling, and be condemned to six months imprisonment." It is unnecessary to add that these English laws, which were in force thirty or forty years ago, are abolished and superseded by laws more humane. Why can I not say as much of the legislation of the French islands, where six young slaves, suspected of an intention to escape, were condemned, by a sentence pronounced in 1815, to have their hamstrings cut!) Notwithstanding the wisdom and mildness of Spanish legislation, to how many excesses the slave is exposed in the solitude of a plantation or a farm, where a rude capatez, armed with a cutlass (machete) and a whip, exercises absolute authority with impunity! The law neither limits the punishment of the slave, nor the duration of labour; nor does it prescribe the quality and quantity of his food.* (* A royal cedula of May 31st, 1789 had attempted to regulate the food and clothing; but that cedula was never executed.) It permits the slave, it is true, to have recourse to a magistrate, in order that he may enjoin the master to be more equitable; but this recourse is nearly illusory; for there exists another law according to which every slave may be arrested and sent back to his master who is found without permission at the distance of a league and a half from the plantation to which he belongs.

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