Indeed the kindness of free Negroes toward their friends and relatives
seeking freedom afforded such an accessible avenue to liberty that those
vigilant white citizens who desired to preserve the institution of slavery
deemed it necessary to put obstructions in the way. A law which required
any slave manumitted after May 1, 1806 to leave the State within the space
of twelve months was passed in 1806 and remained in force until the war
rendered it obsolete. Forfeiture of freedom was the penalty for refusal to
accept banishment. From this act dates the beginning of this benevolent
type of slavery. Free Negroes continued to purchase their relatives but
held them as slaves, refusing to decree their banishment by executing a
deed or will of manumission.
A pathetic example of this kind was the case of Negro Daniel Webster of
Prince William County. At the age of sixty when an illness forced him to
the conclusion that life was short, he sent a petition to the legislature
saying that he had thus far avoided the evil consequences of the law of
1806 by retaining his family in nominal slavery but that then he faced the
alternative of manumitting his family to see it disrupted and banished or
of holding his slave family together till his death, when its members like
other property belonging to his estate would be sold as slaves to masters
of a different type. He begged that exception be made to the law of 1806 in
the case of his wife and children so that he might feel at liberty to
manumit them.[16]
A similar petition to the Legislature in 1839 by Ermana, a slave woman,
stated that her husband and owner had been a free man of color, that he had
died intestate and that she, her children and her property had escheated to
the literary fund. Scores of similar petitions to the Legislature for
special acts of relief tell the story of how black men and women who owned
members of their families neglected too long to remove from them the status
of property.
A case more amusing than pathetic was that of Betsy Fuller, a free Negro
huckstress of Norfolk, and her slave husband. The colored man's legal
status was that of property belonging to his wife. Upon the approach of the
Civil War he was blatant in his advocacy of Southern views, thus evincing
his indifference to emancipation.[17]
Feeble efforts were made by the legislature for a score of years before the
war to limit the power of free Negroes to acquire slaves for profit. By an
act of 1832 free Negroes were declared incapable of purchasing or
otherwise acquiring permanent ownership, except by descent, of any slaves
other than husband, wife, and children. Contracts for the sale of a slave
to a black man were to be regarded as void.[18] But even this attempt at
limitation was passed by a bare majority of one.[19] Within three years of
the beginning of the War the law was revised to read: "No free negro shall
be capable of acquiring, except by descent, any slave." [20] In the opinion
of a judge who passed upon this law, its object was "to keep slaves as far
as possible under the control of white men only, and to prevent free
negroes from holding persons of their own race in personal subjection to
themselves. Perhaps also it is intended to evince the distinctive
superiority of the white race." [21]
Whatever may have been their object these acts are of more significance
because of the story they tell than they ever were in accomplishing the
emancipation of slaves from masters of the black race. The period of the
existence of the black master was conterminous with the period of the
existence of slavery. By the same immortal proclamation which broke the
shackles of slaves serving white masters were rent asunder, also, the bonds
which held slaves to masters of their own race and color.
JOHN H. RUSSELL, PH.D.,
(_Professor of Political Science, Whitman College, Walla Walla,
Washington._)