James Redpath, The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States.

If a white man owes a debt to a person of color, and refuses to pay it, it is impossible for the creditor to resort to legal remedies in order to collect it.

If a white man, from any cause or motive — for the purpose, for example, of extorting money — chooses to swear before a court that any colored person, whether free or slave, has been insolent to him, he can cause the unfortunate object of his malice to be whipped by the public officers.

If a worthless vagabond, with a white skin, however black his heart may be, enters the store of a free man of color, and steals, even before the owner's eyes, any articles from it, the unfortunate merchant has no legal remedy, unless a white man saw the property thus feloniously appropriated — for the fear of the municipal lash restrains him from entering a public complaint or resenting the robbery on the spot.

Thus the blacks are always at the mercy of the whites — a position which no uncolored person, I am sure, would be willing to occupy.

In stating these facts, my informant related an incident which I shall narrate here, as it is at once a most striking illustration of the injustice sometimes practised by “our Southern brethren” toward their colored fellow creatures, and serves to show the practical workings of the laws relating to the oaths of persons of the subjugated race.

A few weeks before this interview, a white man went to the green market and was putting some vegetable — parsley, I believe — in his basket, when the colored woman in attendance asked him if he had measured it? He turned round fiercely and asked what she meant by insulting him. Next day he