or even the principal requisite in the judicial character; or if zeal in behalf of a good cause, could authorize the dispensers of justice to gratify any private feelings on the Bench, we should not have a word to say upon any part of these proceedings. But a judge has one duty only to perform; and if any man should be free from all passion, nay, from all feeling, (were it possible), it is he who sits on the judgment seat. Indeed, it appeared from some passages in this Report, that the current of public feeling runs pretty strongly against the slave trade at Sierra Leone. We find the editor suppressing the names of the prisoner's counsel, because,' (says he) they would probably not like the world to know they had defended slave traders; as if there were any case in which the prisoner's counsel exerted himself in favour of the crime; and as if there were any charge under which the accused (who may be in fact, and must be in law presumed, innocent before conviction) ought to be left undefended. Nor is this merely the over zeal and the blunder of the reporter. The prisoner's counsel begins his defence with apologizing for defending him; he states his reluctance to have any thing to do in this cause;' and extenuates the offence of assisting a person on his trial, by saying, that he had been assigned by the court. The account given of the subsequent proceedings leads to a similar inference,-that at Sierra Leone there was no want of right feeling on the subject of the slave trade; and that the zeal of the community rather stood in need of a check than a stimulant. It was therefore peculiarly the duty of the judge to stand between the accused and this popular feeling, exactly as in the other colonies the first duty of the magistrate undoubtedly is, to stand between the negro and his oppressors, that the deep-rooted prejudices of the whites may not carry away before them all law, humanity, and justice. In neither case is it intended to be insinuated, that the judge should take a zealous part one way or the other. Zeal indeed we may expect in him; but it should only be a zeal for the rigorous and unbending enforcement of the law,-neither relaxing it in favour of the whites in the West Indies, nor stretching it against the slave merchants themselves in Africa. Whether the circumstances to which we have alluded after *It appears that there might have been evidence produced of his being an Englishman, had the prosecutors conducted their case with due attention to law, and thought fit to prove that material fact at the trial; for, on the motion in arrest of judgment, two affidavits were read on the part of the prosecutor, stating, that Samo had frequently admitted himself to be an Englishman. This evi dence wards occurred to the judge and the prosecutor, we know not; but they did not proceed to pass the sentence of the law upon Samo. After the motion in arrest of judgment had been disposed of, the judge exhorted him, and the other slave-traders in the Rio Pongas, to save him, by taking effectual steps towards extirpating the traffic there; holding out an expectation of pardon if something satisfactory should be done previous to the next Sessions. The prisoner was accordingly remanded; and the following extract from a letter, giving an account of the sequel, will show, that this man's trial has not been without its advantages to the abolition. On the 11th of June, Samuel Samo was brought up for judg ment. The merciful suggestion contained in the address of the honourable Chief Justice to the prisoner when he was remanded, was improved by the friends of Samo, who, from his long residence in the Soosoo nation, his wealth, and extensive business and connexion, was an object of consequence. Though Samo had never been be loved, (and, indeed, what slave trader could be?) he was respected; and it would be no presumption in him to expect that his friends, whether Europeans or natives, would make great exertions to save him from enduring the penalty he had so justly incurred. Some time previously to the day appointed for receiving his dreadful and ignominious sentence, several petitions were humbly tendered to his Excellency Governor Maxwell, praying for the pardon of the prisoner. Three of these petitions were written in Arabic; one from the King of the Mandingo nation; one from the King at the Isles de Loss; and one from Mungo Catty, King of the Soosoo nation. The remaining two petitions were in English; one from the European settlers, in the Soosoo nation, and the other from the British settlers at the Isle de Loss. A future occasion will be taken to make the whole of these interesting documents public. The Arabic petitions abound with tenderness and originality. For the present, it will suffice to remark, that they were all written in the language of pathos, sincerity, and submission, and bound the petitioners to abandon the abominable slave traffic, and to do all in their power to bring it to a total termination, upon the condition that Samo should be discharged by virtue of the royal pardon, and restored to his friends. To have the "father of the trade, converted into its avowed enemy, and all his African connexion solemnly pledged to assist him in the humane work of abolition, was a great point gained, and infinitely preferable to sacrificing an individual slave trader dence would certainly have been sufficient, had it been given at the trial, and in the legal manner, by parole examination. It would at least have thrown it on the prisoner, to get rid of it by other evidence, such as entries in parish books, or testimony of several wit nesses. to the rigour of the law. Governor Maxwell, having consulted the Chief Justice, determined that he would exercise the delightful prerogative with which he was invested, of extending the royal pardon to the unhappy convict.' p. 36, 37. Having made this extract, we cannot resist adding another from the same letter, for the singular (we ought perhaps rather to say, the too frequent) enormities to which it adverts incidentally. On the day appointed, Samuel Samo was put to the bar to hear the sentence the law directs for the crime of which he stood convicted. Mr Biggs moved, in arrest of judgment, that the royal pardon' might be read, which being done by the Clerk of the Crown, the learned Chief Justice addressed the prisoner in a manner that not only impressed him, but moved every heart in the Court. He enjoined, and explained the gratitude the prisoner ought to feel at being released from a most ignominious punishment, which, from his age and frame, must have accelerated a death, whose terrors (from the habits of his life) he must be unprepared to encounter. He mentioned, that on a former occasion he had stated many of the miseries the negro suffered, from the moment he was caught till he was shipped, to all of which the slave factor was accessary. The horrid scenes the prisoner must have witnessed on board a ship in the Rio Pongas, when the slave factors were carousing at dinner with one William Browne, (master of a Liverpool slave ship), might have deterred him from this pursuit. The rum in the cabin being exhausted, a person was despatched to the hold to open a fresh cask which caught fire from a candle; the ship was soon in flames; the inebriated factors saved themselves in their boats. Twenty-five slaves, not in irons, were drowned, and above seventy in irons, in the hold, were consumed to ashes! yet one of the wretches who was present, and who had just returned from the Matanzas, had assured him (the learned Judge) that the miseries he saw the negroes suffer in Cuba, so far exceeded any thing he imagined, that he had determined to decline the trade for ever. He next spoke of the ship Caracai, that had been sent to Bahia with eleven hundred slaves; five hundred died on their passage; and of the six hundred landed, it was not supposed many could survive. A vessel that had foundered at sea, and the whole cargo of slaves perished, while the master and the men escaped in the boats, was also dwelt upon; and the pangs thus wantonly caused by the trade in human flesh, forcibly impressed on the recollection of the prisoner." p. 37, 38. To the arrangement detailed in these extracts, we conceive there can be but one objection, and that not to the proceeding itself, but to the manner only of its accomplishment. The af fair was perfectly fit for the Governor; but it would have been better if the Judge had not interposed so openly in it, more es F VOL. XXI. NO. 41. specially by the terms publicly held out in his address to the prisoner on remanding him. The other trials reported in the Tract before us do not furnish the same room for observation. That of Hickson is not given at all we are only told he was acquitted. Wheler's trial and acquittal is noticed with equal brevity; and though a fuller account is given of the convictions of Peters and Tufft, we shall not dwell at great length upon them. The case of Peters appears to have been of an aggravated kind. He had been a surgeon's mate on board a King's ship; had been for six years in the employ of the factory at Bance Island, and was receiving pay for attendance on the British troops at the time of committing the felony. It is not stated from what country he came; but we are left to suppose he was a British subject; and as, at any rate, he committed the acts of slave trading within the limits of a British settlement, the difficulty that occurred in Samo's case does not here arise: The evidence very much resembles that on the former trial: it is mixed up with a vast deal of matter which cannot be called evidence; but there is quite enough, and more than enough, of strict legal testimony to warrant most clearly the conviction. The reader may be interested with the various forms in which the native witnesses were sworn; each being allowed, very properly, to take the oath according to the custom of his nation. One swore by his mother, and wished she might die, if he did not speak the truth; and hoped, if he did not relate the whole truth, that God might strike him dead as the earth, on which he rubbed his two forefingers, and applied the dust to his tongue. Another was sworn on the Koran; a third prayed that God might cause the earth to open and swallow him up, if he concealed the truth. Some kissed the earth, and promised to speak the truth; another was sworn on the Old Testament; another on the New Testament and the earth, as if the purer light of Christianity had not wholly dispelled his Pagan darkness. Several seem to have been sworn by their mother and the earth. There is something very simple and affecting in these poor people regarding the death of their mother as the greatest evil that an offended Deity could inflict on them. Neither Peters nor Tufft seem to have made any defence; and the former was sentenced to seven years transportation; the latter to three years hard labour in the public works. We have stated that Peters was a person in a respectable station; Tufft, who seems to have been his partner in these infamous transactions, was a black man, who had been educated in England, and had lived as a servant in the family of a nobleman near Windsor. Upon the whole, it is impossible to doubt that these proceedings, but more especially the satisfactory and regular convictions of Peters and Tufft, and the severe and degrading, but most just punishments which they are now suffering for their crimes, must be productive of very happy effects in every part of the world where the knowledge of them shall be spread. The indelible stigma which the law had already fixed upon the offence, is now exhibited in the more plain and visible form of actual infliction; and the minds of men, after being weaned. from the habit of regarding slave-dealing as a kind of commerce, will now become accustomed, more thoroughly than ever, to view it as a criminal act, when they see it punished, and in every respect dealt with as other felonies, the commission of which exposes the offender to the vengeance of the law, and renders him for ever infamous. It is easy to anticipate the salutary effects which this must produce in every part of the British colonies; and we can scarcely doubt that the example of our jurisprudence will be followed by the American Legislature, which has always shown so much laudable anxiety for the abolition of the traffic. This leads us to a very painful train of reflections on the supineness so long displayed by our Government in carrying into effect the repeated addresses of both Houses of Parliament relative to the slave trade still driven by our allies. We are most unwilling to say any thing harsh, or to indulge in remarks which might give rise to any suspicion that we carried party feelings into this discussion. No such sentiments are present to our minds; on the contrary, we are disposed to give the Government full credit for its exertions, in many important respects, towards furthering the great object which all parties are now united in prosecuting, the enforcement of the Abolition laws. A merit by so much the greater in the present ministers, that they were almost all of them known as the warm opposers of the abolition before it was carried through Parliament. We trust then, that we shall meet with a ready belief, when we assert, that our remarks are wholly untinged with party feelings, and that they are dictated solely by a wish to rouse the attention of the country and the legislature to the serious matter about to be noticed. Those who hold converse with princes and courts, or have access to men in office, may insinuate their sentiments in the form of suggestions, and they have all the chance of their being listened to, and acted on, which the force of reason, and the nature of statesmen, may |