Though the accession of the fifth Lord Baltimore did not reinstate the Catholics in their civil rights, it nevertheless did much to mitigate the operation of the oppressive statutes against them. An early symptom of Charles’s temper was shown by his reappointment of Carroll as his agent. He went on to do such justice to Catholics as was in his power, and under his mild and equitable rule the fierceness of political passion was much abated. The proprietary government retained its popularity until it came to an end with the Declaration of Independence. But the interval of crown government from 1691 to 1715 had for the first time made the connection with Great Britain seem oppressive, and had planted the seeds of future sympathy with the revolutionary party in Massachusetts and Virginia. As the long struggle with France increased in dimensions, the political questions at issue in the several colonies became more and more continental in character. All were more or less assimilated one to another, and thus the way toward federation was prepared. Thus the discussions in Maryland came more and more to deal with the rights of the colonial legislature and British interference with them. At the same time Maryland had a grievance of her own in the poll tax for maintaining a foreign and hated church. In 1772 an assault upon that tax was the occasion of one of the most remarkable legal controversies in American annals; and the leader in that assault, Charles Carroll’s grandson and namesake, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, soon afterward signed his name to the Declaration of Independence.
In 1751, after a tranquil reign, only two years of which were spent in Maryland, Charles Calvert died in London, and was succeeded by his son Frederick, sixth and last Lord Baltimore. After a series of Antonines, at last came the Commodus. Frederick was a miserable debauchee, unworthy scion of a noble race. For Maryland he cared nothing except to spend its revenues in riotous living in London. One adventure of his, for which he was tried and acquitted on a mere technicality, fills one of the most loathsome chapters of the Newgate Calendar.122 But this villain was represented in Maryland by two excellent governors, Horatio Sharpe from 1753 to 1768, and then Sir Robert Eden, who had married Frederick’s younger sister. Eden remained in authority until June 24, 1776, when he embarked for England with the good wishes of the people. The wretched Frederick died in 1771, without legitimate children, and the barony of Baltimore became extinct. By the will of Charles, the fifth baron, the proprietorship of Maryland was now vested in Frederick’s elder sister, Louisa, wife of John Browning. But Frederick had also left a will, in which he devised the province to an illegitimate son, called Henry Harford. This young man laid claim to the proprietorship, but before the chancery suit was ended the Palatinate of Maryland had become one of the thirteen United States.
A learned son of Old Virginia, who is fond of wrapping up a bookful of meaning in a single pithy sentence, has declared that “a true history of tobacco would be the history of English and American liberty.” This remark occurs near the beginning of Mr. Moncure Conway’s dainty volume printed for the Grolier Club, entitled “Barons of the Potomack and the Rappahannock.” When construed liberally, as all such sweeping statements need to be, it contains a kernel of truth. It was tobacco that planted an English nation in Virginia, and made a corporation in London so rich and powerful as to become a formidable seminary of sedition: it was the desire to monopolize the tobacco trade that induced Charles I. to recognize the House of Burgesses; discontent with the Navigation Act and its effect upon the tobacco trade was potent among the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion; and so on down to the eve of Independence, when Patrick Henry won his first triumph in the famous Parson’s Cause, in which the price of tobacco furnished the bone of contention, the Indian weed has been strangely implicated with the history of political freedom.
Furthermore, when we reflect upon the splendid part played by Virginia in winning American independence and bringing into existence the political framework of our Federal Republic; when we recollect that of the five founders of this nation who were foremost in constructive work—Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Marshall—four were Virginians,—it becomes interesting to go back and study the social features of the community in which such leaders of men were produced. The economic basis of that community was the cultivation of tobacco on large plantations, and from that single economic circumstance resulted most of the social features which we have now to pass in review.
We have seen in a previous chapter how important was the cultivation of tobacco in setting the infant colony at Jamestown upon its feet in 1614 and the following years. In the rapid development of the colony during the reign of Charles I. other kinds of agriculture thrived, there were good crops of wheat, and Indian corn was exported. But tobacco culture increased rapidly and steadily until in the latter part of the century it nearly extinguished all other kinds of activity, except the raising of domestic animals and vegetables needed for food. Long before this result was reached, the tendency was deplored by the colonists themselves. To use a modern political phrase, it was “viewed with alarm.” This is quite intelligible. “We know now that tobacco, though not strictly a necessary of life, is one of those articles whose consumption may be looked on as certain and permanent. In the seventeenth century, men could hardly be blamed if they regarded the use of tobacco as a precarious fashion.”123 It was also felt that in case of war it would be dangerous for Virginia to be forced to rely upon importing the manufactured necessaries of life. Moreover, the absorption of the colony’s industry in the production of a single staple made it especially easy for the home government to depress that industry by stupid legislation, as in the reign of Charles II., when the Navigation Act so seriously diminished the purchasing power of tobacco. For these various reasons many attempts were made to check the cultivation of the Indian weed. The legislation of the seventeenth century was full of instances. It was attempted to establish rival industries and to produce silk, cotton, and iron; laws were made forbidding any planter to raise more than 2,000 plants in one year’s crop, and so on. All such attempts proved futile; in spite of everything that could be done, tobacco drove all competitors from the field.
This tobacco was generally cultivated upon large estates. The policy of making extensive grants of land as an inducement to settlers was begun at an early date, and all that was needed to develop the system was an abundance of cheap labour. English yeomanry, such as came to New England, was too intelligent and enterprising to furnish the right sort. English yeomanry, coming to Virginia, came to own estates for itself, not to work them for others. It soon became necessary to have recourse to servile labour. We have seen negro slaves first brought into the colony from Africa in 1619, but their numbers increased very slowly, and it was only toward the end of the century that they began to be numerous. In the early period the demand for servile labour was supplied from other sources. Convicted criminals were sent over in great numbers from the mother country, as in later times they were sent to Botany Bay. On their arrival they were indented as servants for a term of years. Kidnapping was also at that time in England an extensive and lucrative business. Young boys and girls, usually but not always of the lowest class of society, were seized by press-gangs on the streets of London and Bristol and other English seaports, hurried on board ship, and carried over to Virginia to work on the plantations or as house servants. These poor wretches were not, indeed, sold into hopeless slavery, but they passed into a state of servitude which might be prolonged indefinitely by avaricious or cruel masters. The period of their indenture was short,—usually not more than four years; but the ordinary penalty for serious offences, such as were very likely to be committed, was a lengthening of the time during which they were to serve. Among such offences the most serious were insubordination or attempts to escape, while of a more venial character were thievery, or unchaste conduct,124 or attempts to make money on their own account. Their lives were in theory protected by law, but where an indented servant came to his death from prolonged ill-usage, or from excessive punishment, or even from sudden violence, it was not easy to get a verdict against the master. In those days of frequent flogging, the lash was inflicted upon the indented servant with scarcely less compunction than upon the purchased slave; and in general the condition of the former seems to have been nearly as miserable as that of the latter, save that the servitude of the negro was perpetual, while that of the white man was pretty sure to come to an end. For him, Pandora’s box had not quite spilled out the last of its contents.
In England the notion presently grew up that the aristocracy of Virginia was recruited from the ranks of these kidnapped paupers and convicts. This impression may have originated in statements, based upon real but misconstrued facts, such as we find in Defoe’s widely read stories, “Moll Flanders”125 and “Colonel Jack.” So, too, in Mrs. Aphra Behn’s comedy, “The Widow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon in Virginia,” one of the personages, named Hazard, sails to Virginia, and on arriving at Jamestown suddenly meets an old acquaintance, named Friendly, whereupon the following conversation ensues:—
Hazard. This unexpected happiness o’erjoys me. Who could have imagined to have found thee in Virginia?...
Friendly. My uncle dying here left me a considerable plantation.... But prithee what chance (fortunate to me) drove thee to this part of the New World?
Hazard. Why, ’faith, ill company and that common vice of the town, gaming.... I had rather starve abroad than live pitied and despised at home.
Friendly. Would [the new governor] were landed; we hear he is a noble gentleman.
Hazard. He has all the qualities of a gallant man. Besides, he is nobly born.
Friendly. This country wants nothing but to be peopled with a well-born race to make it one of the best colonies in the world; but for want of a governor we are ruled by a council, some of whom have been perhaps transported criminals, who having acquired great estates are now become Your Honour and Right Worshipful, and possess all places of authority.126
It is not only in novels and plays, however, that we encounter such statements. Malachy Postlethwayt, author of several valuable and scholarly treatises on commerce, tells us: “Even your transported felons, sent to Virginia instead of Tyburn, thousands of them, if we are not misinformed, have, by turning their hands to industry and improvement, and (which is best of all) to honesty, become rich, substantial planters and merchants, settled large families, and been famous in the country; nay, we have seen many of them made magistrates, officers of militia, captains of good ships, and masters of good estates.”127 Either from the study of Postlethwayt, or perhaps simply from reading “Moll Flanders,” we may suppose that Dr. Johnson got the notion to which he gave vent in 1769 when quite out of patience because the ministry seemed ready to make some concessions to the Americans. “Why, they are a race of convicts,” cried the irate doctor, “and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging!”128 Thus we witness the progress of generalization: first it is some Virginians that are jail-birds, or offspring of jail-birds, then it is all Virginians, finally it is all Americans. A few years ago, in the time of our Civil War, one used to find this grotesque notion still surviving in occasional polite statements of European newspapers, informing their readers that the citizens of the United States are the “offspring of the vagabonds and felons of Europe.”129
The statement of the worthy Postlethwayt seems based partly on observation, partly on information, and has unquestionably been the source of inferences much more sweeping than facts will sustain. In order to arrive at clear views of the subject, we must distinguish between two questions:—
1. What sort of people, on the whole, were the indented white servants in Virginia?
2. How far did they ever succeed, as freedmen, in attaining to high social position in the colony?
In answering the first question, a mere reference to “felons” and “convicts” will carry us but little way. A considerable proportion of the indented white servants were poor but honest persons who sold themselves into slavery for a brief term to defray the cost of the voyage from England. The ship-owner received from the planter the passage-money in the shape of tobacco, and in exchange he handed over the passenger to be the planter’s servant until the debt was wiped out. Indented servants of this class were known as “redemptioners,” and many of them were eminently industrious and of excellent character. Such redemptioners came in large numbers to Virginia, Maryland, and the middle colonies, and much more rarely to New England, where the demand for any kind of servile labour was but small.
Again, among the transported convicts were many who had been sentenced to death for what would now be considered trivial offences; the poor woman who stole a joint of meat to relieve her starving children was not necessarily a hardened criminal, yet if the price of the joint were more than a shilling she incurred the death penalty. For counterfeiting a lottery ticket, or for personating the holder of a stock and receiving the dividends due upon it, the punishment was the same as for wilful murder.130 The favourite remedy prescribed in law was the gallows, as in medicine the lancet. Yet many judges and officers of state were conscious of the excessive severity of the system, and welcomed the device of sending the less hardened offenders out of the kingdom instead of putting them to death. There is reason for believing that murderers, burglars, and highwaymen continued to be summarily sent to Tyburn, while for offences of a lighter sort and in cases with extenuating circumstances the death penalty was often commuted to transportation. As a rule it was not the worst sort of offenders who were sent to the colonies.
The practice of sending rogues beyond sea began soon after the founding of Virginia, and continued until it was cut short in America by the War of Independence; thereafter the Australasian colonies were made a receptacle for them until the practice came to an end soon after the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been estimated that between 1717 and 1775 not less than 10,000 “involuntary emigrants” were sent from the Old Bailey alone;131 and possibly the total number sent to America from the British islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have been as high as 50,000.132 In the lists of such offenders their particular destinations are apt to be very loosely and carelessly indicated; the name Virginia, for example, is often used so vaguely as to include the West Indies.133 The destinations most commonly specified are Virginia, Maryland, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, but it is certain that all English colonies outside of New England received considerable numbers of convicts. Very few were brought to New England, because the demand for such labour was less than elsewhere, and therefore the prisoners would not fetch so high a price.134 Stringent laws were made against bringing in such people. In 1700 Massachusetts enacted that every master of a ship arriving with passengers must hand to the custom-house officer a written certificate of the “name, character, and circumstances” of each passenger, under penalty of a fine of £5 for every name omitted; and the custom-house officer was obliged to deliver to the town clerk the full list of names with the accompanying certificates.135 The existence of this wholesome statute indicates that undesirable persons had been brought into the colony; and the reënactment of it in 1722, with the fine raised from £5 to £100, is clear proof that the nuisance was not yet abated. Nevertheless, partly because of such vigilant measures of prevention, but much more because of the economic reason above alleged, the four New England colonies received but few convicts.
A very different class of transported persons consisted of those who were not criminals at all, but merely political offenders, or even prisoners of war. For example, of the Scotch prisoners taken at Dunbar in 1650, Cromwell sent about 150 to Boston. The next year orders were issued for sending 1,610 of the Worcester captives to Virginia, but very few of them seem to have arrived there.136 In 1652 a party of 272 men captured at Worcester were landed in Boston, but so small was the demand for their labour that they were soon exported southward,—perhaps to the West Indies in exchange for sugar or rum. After the restoration of the monarchy so many non-conformists were sold into servitude in Virginia as to lead to an insurrection in 1663, followed by legislation designed to keep all convicts out of the colony.137 On the whole, the number of political offenders brought to those colonies that have since become the United States was certainly much smaller than the number of criminal convicts, while the latter were in all probability much less numerous than the redemptioners. During the seventeenth century the demand for wholesale servile white labour was much greater in Virginia and Maryland than elsewhere, and there are many indications that they received more convicts and redemptioners than the other colonies. In the eighteenth century, however, the middle colonies, especially Pennsylvania, probably received at least as large a share.
Our survey shows that in the class of indented white servants there was a wide range of gradation, from thrifty redemptioners138 and gallant rebels at the one extreme down to ruffians and pickpockets at the other. Bearing this in mind, we come to our second question, How far did white freedmen succeed in attaining to high social position in such a colony as Virginia? There is no doubt that, as Postlethwayt declares, some of the best of them did work their way up to the ownership of plantations. In the seventeenth century they were occasionally elected to the House of Burgesses. The composition of that assembly for 1654 affords an interesting example. One of the two members for Warwick was the worthy Samuel Mathews, soon to be elected governor; and one of the four members for Charles City was Major Abraham Wood, who, as a child of ten years, had been brought from England in 1620, and had been a servant of Mathews. John Trussel, the member for Northumberland, and William Worlidge, one of the two members for Elizabeth City, had been servants brought over in 1622, aged respectively nineteen and eighteen.139 Whether these lads had been offenders against the law does not appear, nor do we know whether the child had come with parents not mentioned, or as the victim of kidnappers. We only know that all three were servants,140 and, if the word is to be understood in the ordinary sense, it was much to their credit that they rose to be burgesses. Cases of ordinary indented servants thus rising were certainly exceptional in the seventeenth century, and still more so in the eighteenth. Nothing can be more certain than that the representative families of Virginia were not descended from convicts, or from indented servants of any sort. Although family records were until of late less carefully preserved than in New England, yet the registered facts abundantly prove that the leading families had precisely the same sort of origin as the leading families in New England. For the most part they were either country squires, or prosperous yeomen, or craftsmen from the numerous urban guilds; and alike in Virginia and in New England there was a similar proportion of persons connected with English families ennobled or otherwise eminent for public service.
As for the white freedmen, those of the better sort often acquired small estates, while some became overseers of white servants and black slaves. The kind of life which they led is described in Defoe’s “Colonel Jack” with that great writer’s customary minuteness of information. The class of small proprietors always remained in Virginia, and included many other persons beside freedmen. With the increasing tendency toward the predominance of great estates in tidewater Virginia, there was a tendency for the smaller proprietors to move westward into the Piedmont region or southward into North Carolina, as will appear in the next chapter.
While it was true that “the convicts ... sometimes prove very worthy creatures and entirely forsake their former follies,”141 it was also true that many of them “have been and are the poorest, idlest, and worst of mankind, the refuse of Great Britain and Ireland, and the outcast of the people.”142 These degraded freedmen were apt to be irreclaimable vagabonds. According to Bishop Meade, they gave the vestrymen a great deal of trouble. “The number of illegitimate children born of them and thrown upon the parish led to much action on the part of the vestries and the legislature. The lower order of persons in Virginia in a great measure sprang from those apprenticed servants and from poor exiled culprits. It is not wonderful that there should have been much debasement of character among the poorest population, and that the negroes of the first families should always have considered themselves a more respectable class. To this day [1857] there are many who look upon poor white folks (for so they call them) as much beneath themselves; and, in truth, they are so in many respects.”143 Indeed, the fact that manual labour was a badge of servitude, while the white freedmen of degraded type were by nature and experience unfitted to perform any work of a higher sort, was of itself enough to keep them from doing any work at all, unless driven by impending starvation. As manual labour came to be more and more entirely relegated to men of black and brown skins, this wretched position of the mean whites grew worse and worse. The negro slave might take a certain sort of pride in belonging to the grand establishment of a powerful or wealthy master, and from this point of view society might be said to have a place for him, even though he possessed no legal rights. There was no such haven of security for the mean whites. If the negro was like a Sudra, they were simply Pariahs. Crimes against person and property were usually committed by persons of this class. They were loungers in taverns and at horse-races, earning a precarious livelihood, or violent death by gambling and thieving; or else they withdrew from the haunts of civilization to lead half-savage lives in the backwoods. In these people we may recognize a strain of the English race which has not yet on American soil become extinct or absorbed. There can be little doubt that the white freedmen of degraded type were the progenitors of a considerable portion of what is often called the “white trash” of the South. Originating in Virginia and Maryland, the greater part of it seems to have been gradually sifted out by migration to wilder regions westward and southward, much to the relief of those colonies. As to the probable manner of its distribution, something will be said in the next chapter.
Long before the end of the seventeenth century, Virginia and Maryland had begun to protest against the policy of sending criminals from England,144 and as negro slaves became more numerous white servitude was greatly diminished. The rapid increase of negroes began toward the end of the century, and an immense impetus was given it by the asiento clause of the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. By way of indemnifying herself for the cost of the War of the Spanish Succession, victorious England bade Spain and France keep their hands off from Africa, while she monopolized for herself the slave-trade. We are reminded by Mr. Lecky that this was the one clause in the treaty that seemed to give the most general satisfaction; and while an eminent prelate affixed his name to the treaty and a magnificent Te Deum by Handel was sung in the churches, it occurred to nobody to denounce as unchristian a national scheme for kidnapping thousands of black men and selling them into slavery.145 Before 1713 the part which English ships had taken in the slave-trade was comparatively small; and it is curious now to look back and think how Marlborough and Eugene at Blenheim were unconsciously cutting out work for Grant and Sherman at Vicksburg. In 1700 there were probably 60,000 Englishmen and 6,000 negroes in Virginia; by 1750 there were probably 250,000 whites and 250,000 blacks, while during that same half century the peopling of the Carolinas was rapidly going on.146 This portentous increase of the slave population presently began to awaken serious alarm in Virginia. Attempts were made to restrict the importation of negroes, and at the time of the Revolutionary War the humanitarian spirit of the eighteenth century showed itself in the rise of a party in favour of emancipation. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson announced the principle upon which Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency in 1860, the prohibition of slavery in the national domain; Jefferson attempted to embody this principle in an ordinance for establishing territorial government west of the Alleghanies. In 1787 George Mason denounced the “infernal traffic” in flesh and blood with phrases quite like those which his grandchildren were to resent when they fell from the lips of Wendell Phillips. The life of the anti-slavery party in Virginia was short. After the abolition of the African slave-trade in 1808 had increased the demand for Virginia-bred slaves in the states farther south, the very idea of emancipation faded out of memory.
I have already remarked upon the approval with which negro slavery was by many people regarded in the days of Queen Elizabeth. To bring black heathen within the pale of Christian civilization was deemed a meritorious business.147 But there were people who took a lower and coarser view of the matter. They denied that the negro was strictly human; it was therefore useless to try to make him a Christian, but it was right to make him a beast of burden, like asses and oxen.148 This point of view was illustrated in the remark made by a lady of Barbadoes, noted for her exemplary piety, to Godwyn, the able author of “The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate;” she told him that “he might as well baptize puppies as negroes.”149 This line of thought was pursued to all sorts of grotesque conclusions. Some held that mulattoes were made half human by the infusion of white blood, and might accordingly be baptized. Others deemed it poor economy to baptize the slave, since it would be incumbent on the master to feed Christians better than heathen, and so flog them less. And there were yet others who had heard the doctrine that Christians ought not to be held in bondage, and feared lest baptism should be judged equivalent to emancipation.150 This notion was at first so prevalent in Virginia that in 1667 it was enacted: “Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by vertue of their baptisme be made ffree; It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly and the authority thereof, that the conferringe of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedom; that diverse masters, ffreed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity by permitting children, though, slaves, or those of greater growth if capable, to be admitted to that sacrament.”151
During the seventeenth century the slave was regarded as personal property, but a curious statute of 1705 declared him to be for most purposes a kind of real estate. He could be sold, however, without the registry of a deed; he could be recovered by an action of trover; and he was not reckoned a part of the property qualification which entitled his master to the political privileges of a freeholder.152
In the system of taxation white servants and negro slaves played an important part. The primary tax upon all landholders was the quit-rent of a shilling for every fifty acres, payable at Michaelmas. This quit-rent was at first collected in the name of the Company, but after 1624 in the King’s name; and the proceeds were devoted to various public uses. It was always an unpopular tax, inasmuch as there was no feasible way (as now-a-days with our blessed tariffs) of making dullards believe that “the foreigner paid it,” and there were frequent complaints of delinquency. Another tax was the duty of two shillings upon every hogshead of tobacco exported. A third was the tax upon slaves and servants. At the close of the seventeenth century adult negroes were valued at from £25 to £40, and children at £10 or £12; there seems to have been little if any difference between the prices of men and women.153 The taxation of slave property was equitable, inasmuch as it bore most heavily upon those best able to pay.
It is generally admitted that the treatment of slaves by their masters was mild and humane. There were instances of cruelty, of course. Cruelty forever lurks as a hideous possibility in the mildest system of slavery; it is part of its innermost essence. In every community there are brutes unfit to have the custody of their fellow-creatures. Such a ruffian was the Rev. Samuel Gray, who had his runaway black boy tied to a tree and flogged to death. Separation of families also occurred, though much less frequently than in later times. But cases of cruelty were on the whole rare. The cultivation of tobacco was not such a drain upon human life as the cultivation of sugar in the West Indies, or the raising of indigo and rice in South Carolina. It created a kind of patriarchal society in which the master felt a genuine interest in the welfare of his slaves. “The solicitude exhibited by John Page of York was not uncommon: in his will he instructed his heirs to provide for the old age of all the negroes who descended to them from him, with as much care in point of food, clothing, and other necessaries as if they were still capable of the most profitable labour.”154 The historian, Robert Beverley, writing in 1705, tells us that “the male servants and the slaves of both sexes are employed together in tilling and manuring the ground, in sowing and planting corn, tobacco, etc. Some distinction indeed is made between them in their clothes and food; but the work of both is no other than what the overseers, the freemen, and the planters themselves do.... And I can assure you with a great deal of truth that generally their slaves are not worked near so hard, nor so many hours in a day, as the husbandmen and day-labourers in England.” As for cruelty, he exclaims, with honest fervour, “no people more abhor the thoughts of such usage than the Virginians, nor take more precaution to prevent it.”155
Nevertheless, a state of enforced servitude is something which human nature does not willingly endure. A slave-holding community must provide for catching runaways and suppressing or preventing insurrections. It is one of the remarkable facts in American history that there have been so few insurrections of negroes. There have been, however, occasional instances and symptoms which have kept slave-owners in dread and given rise to harsh legislation. In 1687 a conspiracy among the blacks on the Northern Neck was detected just in time to prevent the explosion.156 In 1710 a similar plot in Surry County was betrayed by one of the conspirators, whom the assembly proceeded to reward by giving him his freedom with permission to remain in the colony.157 The fears engendered by such discoveries are revealed in the statute book. Slaves were not allowed to be absent from their plantations without a ticket-of-leave signed by their master. The negro who could not show such a passport must receive twenty lashes, and was liable to be treated as a fugitive or “outlying” slave. Such runaways were formally outlawed; a proclamation issued by two justices of the peace was read on the next Sunday by the parish clerk from the door of every church in the county, after which anybody might seize the fugitive and bring him home, or kill him if he made any resistance. In the latter event the master was indemnified from the public funds. At the discretion of the county court, such mutilation might be inflicted upon the outlying negro as to protect white women against the horrible crime which then as now he was prone to commit.158 In 1701 we find an act of the assembly directed against “one negro man named Billy,” who “has severall years unlawfully absented himselfe from his masters services, lying out and lurking in obscure places, ... devouring and destroying stocks and crops, robing the houses of and committing and threatening other injuryes to severall of his majestye’s good and leige people.” It was enacted that whosoever should bring in the said Billy alive or dead should receive a thousand pounds of tobacco in reward, and if dead, his master’s loss should be repaired with four thousand pounds. Anybody who should aid or harbour Billy was to be adjudged guilty of felony.159 No penalty was attached to the murder of a slave by his master; but if he were killed by any one else, the master could recover his value, just as in case of damage done to a dog or a horse. Slaves were not allowed to have fire-arms or other weapons in their possession; “and whereas many negroes, under pretence of practising physic, have prepared and exhibited poisonous medicines, by which many persons have been murdered, and others have languished under long and tedious indispositions, and it will be difficult to detect such pernicious and dangerous practices if they should be permitted to exhibit any sort of medicine,” it was enacted that any slave who should prepare or administer any medicine whatsoever, save with the full knowledge and consent of the master or mistress, should suffer death.160 The testimony of a slave could not be received in court except when one of his own race was on trial for life; then, if he should be found to testify falsely, he was to stand for an hour with one ear nailed to the pillory, and then be released by slicing off the ear; the same process was then repeated with the other ear, after which the ceremony was finished at the whipping-post with nine-and-thirty lashes on the bare back, “well laid on.”161 Stealing a slave from a plantation was a capital offence.162 No master was allowed to emancipate one of his slaves, except for meritorious services, in which case he must obtain a license from the governor and council. If a slave were set free without such a license, the church-wardens could forthwith arrest him and sell him at auction, appropriating the proceeds for the parish funds, and thereby lightening the taxes.163 When a license was granted, the master received the usual indemnity, and by an act of 1699 the freedman was required to quit the colony within six months;164 for obviously the presence of a large number of free blacks in the same community with their enslaved brethren was a source of danger. They were apt, moreover, to become receivers of stolen goods, and their shiftless habits made them paupers.165 Nevertheless there were some free negroes in the colony, and at one time they even appear to have had the privilege of voting, for an act of 1723 deprived them of it; but no free negroes, whether men or women, were exempt from taxation.166
Since gentlemen from the North American colonies and from the West Indies not unfrequently visited England, and sometimes remained there for months or years, it was quite natural that they should take with them household slaves to whose personal attendance they were accustomed. In course of time the question thus arose whether the arrival of a slave upon the free soil of England worked his emancipation. According to Virginia law it did not.167 The opinion expressed in 1729 by Lord Talbot, the attorney-general, and supported by Lord Hardwicke, agreed with the Virginia theory. These eminent lawyers held that mere arrival in England was not enough to free a slave without some specific act of emancipation, but Chief Justice Holt expressed a contrary opinion. Meanwhile masters kept carrying negroes to London until in 1764 the “Gentleman’s Magazine” asserted (surely with wild exaggeration) that no less than 20,000 were domiciled there. Escape was so easy for them that their owners felt obliged to put collars on them, duly inscribed with name and address. In 1685 the “London Gazette” advertised Colonel Kirke’s runaway black boy, upon whose silver collar the colonel’s arms and cipher were engraved; in 1728 the “Daily Journal” informs us that a stray negro has on his collar the inscription, “My Lady Bromfield’s black in Lincoln’s Inn Fields;” and in the “London Advertiser,” 1756, a goldsmith in Westminster announces that he makes “silver padlocks for Blacks’ or Dogs’ collars.” Colonel Kirke and Lady Bromfield were not American visitors, but residents in London, and there is evidence, not abundant but sufficient, that negroes were now and then bought and sold there for household service. When the forger John Rice was hanged at Tyburn in 1763, his effects were sold at auction, and a black boy brought £32. A similar sale at Richmond in 1771 was mentioned in terms of severe condemnation by the “Stamford Mercury.”168 However the English people may have sanctioned the establishment of slavery beyond sea, they were not disposed to tolerate it at home; and in the sixty years withal since the treaty of Utrecht, the public conscience had grown tender on the subject. The days of Clarkson and Wilberforce were at hand. A cry was raised by the press, a test case was brought before the King’s Bench, and in 1772 Lord Mansfield pronounced the immortal decision that “as soon as a slave sets foot on the soil of the British islands he becomes free.”