The American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence By Richard C. Simmons
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“This legislation and other sources reveal that not all the early Negro population in the Chesapeake were slaves, although the percentage of free Negroes was very small. The early treatment of the free Negro was in part an index of racial feeling; later it also became at index of the degree to which the slave system was felt to be a stable one, able to coexist alongside a free black class. One result of the increase in the total African population at the end of the seventeenth century seems to have been a diminution in the opportunities for the manumission of slaves and in the status of free Negroes.”
“Although non slave Negroes could always hold some forms of property in Virginia and Maryland, they were forbidden to own white servants, to possess weapons, to hold any kind of office—“civil, military or ecclesiastic”–or generally to be witnesses in law courts, or in Virginia to vote in 1723 (but nor did they vote in Maryland). This last act brought a protest from the English Attorney General, who wrote that he could “not see why one freeman should be used worse than another merely because of his complexion.”
“The Virginia governor replied that it was necessary “to fix a Perpetual Brand upon Free Negroes and Mulattos by excluding them from that great Privilege of a Freeman, well knowing that they always did, and ever will, adhere to and favor the Slaves. And ‘its likewise done with design, which I must think a good one, to make the free Negros sensible that a distinction ought to be made between their offspring and the Descendants of an Englishman, with whom they never were to be Accounted Equal.“
“The manumission of slaves was not only gradually made more difficult for the owner but in Virginia in 1691 the assembly declared that freed slaves should leave the colony. Again, the motive was to protect the slave system, since it was held that free Negroes and mulattoes were sympathetic to Negro slaves. In 1723 manumission was made even more difficult, and it seems that it was now meant only to be given to slaves who had betrayed slave plots or crimes.”
Source: The American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence By Richard C. Simmons
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