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100 well they might assent!) that the claim of John Jackson to salvage, should be sustained as regarded the negroes claimed by and adjudged to them - and as regarded those adjudged to the United States, to an allowance of twenty five dollars for each according the Act of Congress of 3d March 1819. This decree was pronounced on the 21st of February 1821 - and the clerk of the court was directed on or before the 26th day of the same month to report to the court the number of Spanish and Portuguese negroes in the hands of the marshal, distinguishing the negroes respectively belonging to each. He was also required to designate the very small number adjudged to the United States, that is, to the blessed enjoyment of themselves and their own liberty; and associating with himself two resident merchants, was at the same time to report the quantum or proportion of salvage to be allowed to Captain Jackson for the negroes thus reputably and substantially sold by the judicial authority of the United States to the Spanish and Portuguese Vice Consuls. This unblushing bargain and sale of human captives, entitled at least by the intention of the United States laws to their freedom, was the first incident which brought to a pause the legal standard of morality of a Connecticut District Judge of the United States in the case of the Amistad captives. An estimate in dollars and cents of the value at New Haven, of from two to three hundred living men and women, for the purpose of allowing salvage upon them as merchandise, was too much for the nerves of a Yankee judge. The authority of the case of the Antelope was in this particular no precedent for him. The very proposal shocked his moral sense, and he instantly decided that men and women were not articles for a price current in the markets overt of Connecticut. In the markets of Savannah, nothing was more simple. The clerk of the District Court, with his two associated resident merchants, in obedience to the order of the judge appraized the negroes taken from the Spanish and Portuguese vessels at three hundred dollars per head, making the aggregate of sixty-one thousand five hundred dollars [for 205 souls]; and they were of opinion that there should be an allowance of one fourth of said sum to Captain Jackson, his officers and crew, for salvage on the said negroes. Seventy-five dollars per head! Fifteen thousand three hundred 101 and seventy-five dollars for two hundred and five men and women! What a revolution in the relative value of slaves and of freemen, since the age of Homer! In the estimate of that Prince of Grecian Poets. Jove fix'd it certain that whatever day Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away - and in the political statistics of the author of the Declaration of Independence the degradation of the character of man, by the infliction upon him of slavery is far greater than is asserted by the blind old rhapsodist of Smyrna. But here we have an inverted proportion of relative value, and Captain Jackson, by the decree of a Judicial Court of the United States receives twenty-five dollars a head for redeeming one parcel of Africans from slavery to freedom, while at the same time he was to receive seventy-five dollars a head for reducing by the same act two other parcels of the same company from freedom to slavery! Nor was the manner in which the clerk of the District Court executed the order to report the relative numbers of the three classes of the captured Africans, the least extraordinary part these proceedings. Has reported that two hundred and fifty-eight negroes had been delivered by Captain John Jackson, Commander of the Revenue Cutter Dallas, on the 25th of July, 1820, to the marshal of Georgia, from on board the General Ramirez [the Antelope.] That of that number forty-four had died in the space of seven months - one was missing and one discharged by order of court, and that the marshal returned two hundred and twelve negroes which remained to be apportioned. What had become of the missing one neither the clerk nor the judge seems to have thought it worth his while to inquire - why should they? It was but one man - and that man a negro! no further trace of him appears upon the record. Neither was it thought necessary to record the reason of the favor bestowed by the court upon one other man in ordering his discharge. The very nature of the order is its own justification. But mark the mortality of the negroes! out of 258, four deaths in the space of seven months! and that, not while crammed between the decks of a slaver in the middle passage, but on the soil of the American Union, in the mild and healthy climate of Georgia - in the custody of an officer commissioned by the President
