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ship or any ministry; nor shall any white person be
deemed incompetent as a witness or juror on account of
religious belief, profession or practice, who believes in the
existence of God, and that, under His dispensation, such
person will be held morally accountable for his acts, and
be rewarded or punished therefor either in this world or
in the world to come. "
Signed Fred. J. Nelson, B. A. Jamison, O. Hammond, S.
J. Bradley, J. Morris, Jno. F. Ireland, J. Montgomery
Peters, Nicholas Brewer, Geo. F. Austin.
Mr. Carter said the reports did not diverge on any
other point except that negroes shall be admitted as wit-
nesses in the courts of justice. The witness and juror
are associated together so far as relates to religious
belief, but so far as relates to the other qualifications of
the witness, it is left to the General Assembly. If the
General Assembly shall hereafter, from the workings of
the system as recommended by the committee, find that
it results badly, it will be in the power of that body to
amend it. The minority report leaves out altogether any
allusion to negroes testifying in the courts. The first
time that this subject was acted on in Maryland was in
1717, when the Provincial Assembly passed an act, chap-
ter 13, declaring that negroes, mulattoes, &c., should not
testify in certain cases. They were declared incapable of
testifying in cases where a Christian white man was con-
cerned, and this was the legislation of Maryland down to
1846, when the word "Christian" was struck out. The
Convention will thus see that it was a legislative act al-
together by which negroes were rendered incapable of tes-
tifying, and therefore it will be no new thing to leave this
matter to legislative control hereafter.
Now to the points: In the first place, the incapacity
of the negroes is the incapacity of a class. It is class leg-
islation; it takes the negro race as a race. The old com-
mon law of England, upon which was founded all that is
sound in our own system, only declares three grounds of
incapacity to testify; first, where the party has an im-
mediate interest in the suit; second, where the party is
not of sufficient mind or ability to understand what he is
talking about, and thirdly, where the party has no regard
for the sanctity of an oath. The theory which has ob-
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