29

HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 657

broadsides and newspaper essays as well as his physical assaults on his enemies. The
1810 U.S. census listed him as the owner of thirty-four slaves, whom Gibson reputedly
ruled over as a stern taskmaster. Gibson's plantation belonged to his son Fayette
at the time to which Douglass refers. 1810 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County,
342; Tilghman, Talbot County, 1:231-56; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 60,
221.
32.4-5 no slave was. . .his brother slave] Maryland passed several laws designed
to regulate the treatment of slaves. A 1715 law empowered courts to give freedom to
a slave whose master repeatedly denied adequate food, shelter, and rest, or who physically
punished a slave by dismemberment or cauterization. A 1751 law guaranteed, at
least for a few years, a trial by jury to slaves accused of crimes. Another law, passed
in 1752, allowed the manumission of only those slaves who were in good health and
under fifty years of age. As Douglass suggests, however, the actual enforcement of
laws against physical abuse was rare. Because slaves could not testify against whites
in a court of law, a case of abuse could be proved only if a white person was willing
to stand up for them in court. John Codman Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage
in the United States, 2 vols. (Boston, 1858-62), 1:251-54; Miller and Smith,
Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, 446.
32.7 they could themselves own no property] U.S. Civil Code, article 35, stated
that a slave "can possess nothing or acquire any thing but what must belong to his
master." The only exception was the Civil Code of Louisiana. Article 175 of the
Louisiana Civil Code allowed slaves to possess property, but only the property his
master allowed him. U.S. courts upheld the right of masters regarding decisions in the
matter of slave property ownership made by state legislatures. William Goodell, The
American Slave Code in Theory and Practice (1853; New York, 1968), 89-92;
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "Institutions and the Law of Slavery: Slavery in
Capitalist and Non-Capitalist Cultures," American Quarterly, 9:159-79 (Summer
1957).
32.32 Long Point] A tract of land between the Miles and Wye Rivers at the southernmost
end of the Broad Creek Neck between Harris Creek and Broad Creek, in
Talbot County, Maryland. In the nineteenth century the property was owned by the
Harrison family, who lived in the mansion house built by Ralph Elston in the late
eighteenth century. Swepson Earle, The Chesapeake Bay Country (Baltimore, 1923),
363-64; idem. ed., Maryland's Colonial Eastern Shore (1916; Bowie, Md., 1996),
37-38.
32.32 Miles river] Originally known as the St. Michaels River, the twelve-mile-
long Miles River lies entirely within Talbot County. The right-angled river flows
southwest for its first eight miles and then flows northwest to meet the Chesapeake
Bay at the town of St. Michaels. Footner, Rivers of the Eastern Shore, 236, 239-40,
255.
32.33 the Wye] Maryland 's Wye River is an estuary on the Eastern Shore that
extends about thirteen miles south from a point east of Queenstown to Eastern Bay. A