In the Northern colonies the growth was stunted by the climate.

Elsewhere the institution, beginning with the domestic service of a few bondmen attached to their masters' families, took on a new type of malignity as it expanded.

In proportion as the servile population increases to such numbers as to be formidable, laws of increasing severity are directed to restraining or repressing it.

The first symptoms of insurrection are followed by horrors of bloody vengeance, and "from that time forth the slave laws have but one quality--that of ferocity engendered by fear."[153:1] It was not from the willful inhumanity of the Southern colonies, but from their terrors, that those slave codes came forth which for nearly two centuries were the shame of America and the scandal of Christendom.

It is a comfort to the heart of humanity to reflect that the people were better than their laws; it was only at the recurring periods of fear of insurrection that they were worse.