Master-Slave Relationship Quotes
Slaves could not own property in most of Southern America. The Greeks, the Romans, the ancient Germans, the Poles, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the French had provided, both by law and by custom, for the possession of property by the slave, which could, not be seized by his master. This is another sense in which American slavery was even worse than most slavery had been.
This principle has been characteristic of almost all legal systems in one form or another. In some, the actual perpetrator of the crime is also held guilty. Not so with the Visigoths with their strong system of fairness in everything but religion where they were primitive and maniacal. The Nuremberg Trials did not protect the perpetrator if the order itself was illegal. This compilation is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.
What was particularly interesting about this quotation is that Pinkney was a political leader of Maryland, a slave state. He saw the injustice and immorality of slavery but like many others of our founding fathers assumed that ending slavery would infringe on the property rights of the slave holders. Others argued that there can be no right to deny others their basic rights—property and wealth are subordinate to natural rights. See {632258} and {632259} for more on this point.
