Some Virginia Statutes with Respect to Slavery Having by her act of 1778, prohibiting the importation of slaves, provided against any increase in their number from without, Virginia at the close of the Revolution proceeded to legislate with respect to those already in her midst, permitting and encouraging their gradual emancipation.
STATUTE PERMITTING EMANCIPATIONS
Under British rule, slaveholders were forbidden to manumit their slaves, except with the permission of the Council.[48] In 1782, the General Assembly of Virginia enacted a law, under which slaveholders were authorized to emancipate their slaves by deed or will duly made and recorded.[49]
By an act passed in 1785, it was provided that slaves brought into the state and remaining twelve months should be free.[50]
In 1787, acts were passed validating certain manumissions made by wills prior to 1782, the General Assembly declaring that it was "just and proper" that "the benevolent intentions" of the testators should be carried into effect.[51]
In 1788, an act was passed making the enslaving of the child of free blacks a crime punishable by death upon the scaffold.[52]
In 1795, an act was passed allowing a slave to sue in forma pauperis in any court proceedings affecting his freedom. He might make complaint to the nearest magistrate or court and the owner was then required to give bond to permit the slave to attend the next term of the court and maintain his cause. If the owner failed or refused to comply, the slave was taken into the custody of the state, counsel was assigned to defend his cause and every process of the law allowed him without cost.[53] Following the adoption of the foregoing laws, the General Assembly, in 1803, passed an act to still further safeguard the rights of negroes who had secured their freedom. By this last act the authorities were required to keep registers in each county in which were to be recorded the names of all the free negroes and also the names of slaves whose right to manumission would accrue upon the death of the person having only an estate for life in such slaves.
STATUTE RESTRICTING EMANCIPATION
The effect of these acts facilitating and encouraging manumissions at length began to appear. At the close of the Revolution there were less than three thousand free negroes in Virginia.[54] In the ten years next succeeding, they reached thirteen thousand, and the census of 1810 records their number at thirty thousand, five hundred and seventy. Here was a new problem—the presence in a state dominated by white men of a considerable body of negroes possessing neither the privileges of the whites nor amenable to the restrictions imposed upon the great mass of the blacks. As a result of these conditions, acts were passed in 1806 providing that no slaves thereafter manumitted should remain in Virginia. In 1819 an act was passed authorizing the County Courts to permit such as were "sober, peaceful, orderly and industrious to remain in the state."[55] Later, it was provided by statute that all slaves thereafter manumitted should leave the state within twelve months from the date of their emancipation. Thenceforward slaveholders were accorded the right to manumit their slaves, subject to the claims of their creditors and to the obligation upon the former slaves of going beyond the state within twelve months following their manumission.
While these last mentioned statutes embarrassed the work of emancipation, they stimulated the sentiment in favor of colonization. However, despite the difficulties which confronted them, slaveholders still continued to emancipate their slaves and hostility to the institution of slavery—the conviction that it was a burden upon the commonwealth—became more and more widespread among the people. The growth of these sentiments continued until the year 1832. The Rev. Philip Slaughter, a writer with pro-slavery sympathies, records:
"That was the culminating point—the flood tide of anti-slavery feeling which had been gradually rising for more than a century in Virginia was then precipitated upon us before its time by the Southampton convulsion."[56]
To the disastrous effects upon public sentiment of this tragic event which occurred in August, 1831, must be added the reactionary influence of the Abolitionists, who now began their work of agitation and their arraignment, not simply of slavery nor of slaveholders, but of the morality and civilization of every community in which the institution existed. The failure, too, of the General Assembly of Virginia at its session of 1832 to adopt any plan for the gradual abolition of slavery or for the removal beyond the state of the free negroes then within her borders was also strongly reactionary. Despite the ability and influence of the anti-slavery leaders in that body no remedial legislation was adopted and thousands of the people accepted the result as proof of the fact that the practical difficulties in the way of emancipation were such as to shut out the hope of its accomplishment.
