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murders and outrages might be committed with impunity
in the presence of negroes if they were not allowed to
testify. He had yet to meet the first intelligent man al
home who was opposed to making it the duty of the negro
to testify.
Mr. Merrick said it seemed to him, with all respect to
the opinions of others, that undue importance had been
given to this subject by those who opposed the report of
the committee. They had endeavored to show that the
effect of this section was to elevate a negro to political
equality with the white man, but there was no greater
misapprehension. The qualifications of a witness had
nothing whatever to do with and therefore had no analogy
to, the qualifications of a juror. So with the question of
suffrage. Had not the female and the child testified in
the past, and had that induced any one to assert that the
intelligent female was a competent juror, legislator or
voter?
Mr. Peters asked if the gentleman thought that a
negro was equal in intelligence to the white child?
Mr. Merrick was coming to that. When the law was
passed excluding the negro from the witness box—it was
in 1713, and the condition of the negro was very different
then from what it is now—he was an imported savage,
and was then inferior in intelligence to the white child.
His moral nature was of the lowest order, and his state of
antagonism to the white man made it then necessary to
exclude him. But the negro was now very different from
what he was. He did not hesitate to say, and without
any fear of being accused of being in sympathy with that
abolition feeling of which gentlemen seemed so fearful,
that today the negro of Maryland was intelligent, honest
and conscientious, and was a totally different being than
when he was brought here in the slave ships of Rhode
Island. This was no political question, but one that be-
longed to the principles of jurisprudence. He (Mr. M. )
was born in the midst of one of the largest slaveholding
counties in the State; all those whose blood flowed in his
veins had been slaveholders, and he did not think he could
be accused of falling in the tide of that abolition torrent of
which so much had been said. He did not hesitate to say
that it was nothing but false pride which restrained the
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