CHAPTER I.

LIBERTIES OF THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR.

The Free People of Color, though not in a con lition of Chattelhood, are con stantly exposed to it, and at best enjoy only a portion of their rights.

WE have already seen how, in many ways, a free colored person may be enslaved. He may be enslaved for assisting a slave, however nearly related to him, to escape into freedom. He may be enslaved for being suspected of being himself a runaway slave; for being thus imprisoned, and unable to pay his jail fees. He may be reënslaved, after having been emancipated, if the process were not in exact accordance with unreasonable and vexatious regulations; or if, however regularly emancipated, he presumes to remain among his friends, and amid the scenes of his childhood. He may be enslaved for incurring fines which he is unable to pay, under unjust and unequal enactments. He may be enslaved for not being able, by white witnesses, to prove himself free! Though a Northern man, and always before free, he may be enslaved by entering a slave State, (Georgia or Maryland,) and thus incurring a fine and being unable

to pay it. (Jay's Inquiry, 24. Child's Appeal, p. 64.) He may be enslaved, with his children after him, for being married to a slave. He may be enslaved by being unlawfully and piratically imported into a slave State, even though the kidnapper may be arrested and punished! And in none of the free States can any free native colored citizen be safe from the operation of the Federal Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850, and from the clutches of United States Marshals and Commissioners! The law presumes him to be a slave unless he can prove himself free. (Wheeler's Law of Slavery, pp. 5, 6.) "In South Carolina, if a free negro cross the line of the State, he can never return." (Child's Appeal, p. 68.)

"Mississippi, in 1831, passed a law to expel all [free] colored persons under sixty and over sixteen years of age, within ninety days, unless they could prove good characters, and obtain from the Court a certificate of the same, for which they paid three dollars: these certificates might be revoked at the discretion of the County Courts. If such persons do not quit the State within the time specified, or if they return to it, they may be sold for a term not exceeding five years." (Ib., p. 68.) And persons sold for a term of years seldom regain their freedom, as has been ascertained in the District of Columbia.

In Tennessee, emancipated slaves must leave the State forthwith. (Ib., p. 68.)

While tracing, in the preceding chapters, the legal condition of the slave, we have found the "free negro, mulatto, or mestizo," associated with him in some of

the most painfully humiliating incidents of his degradation. Like the slave, the free colored person is held incompetent to testify against a white man! Like the slave, he is debarred, to a great extent, from the benefits of education, and from the right of enjoying free social worship and religious instruction! Like the slave, he is required to be passive, without exercising the right of self-defense, under the insults and assaults of the white man! Like the slave, as will be shown, he is denied the ordinary safeguards of an impartial trial by a jury of his peers. Like the slave, he has no vote nor voice in framing the laws under which he is governed. Even in many of the free States he exercises this right only on unequal conditions, or coupled with invidious distinctions! And yet he is complimented with the title of "free!” To be a "free negro" differs widely, it would seem, from being a free man!

For striking a white man, in Maryland, no matter for what cause, a Justice may "direct the offender's ears to be cropped, though he be a free black." (Stroud, p. 97. Act of 1723, chap. 15.)

In Louisiana it is gravely set forth, by express statute, that "free people of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves equal to the whites; but, on the contrary, they ought to yield to them on every occasion, and never speak or answer them but with respect, but, under penalty OF IMPRISONMENT, according to the nature of the offense." (1 Martin's Digest, 640–42.)

"In some of the States, if a free man of color is

accused of crime, he is denied the benefit of those forms of trial which the Common Law has established for the protection of innocence. Thus, in South Carolina, it is thought quite unnecessary to give the Grand and Petit Jury the trouble of inquiring into the case: he can be hung without so much ceremony. But who is a colored man? We answer, the fairest man in Carolina, if it can be proved that a drop of negro blood flowed in the veins of his mother." (Jay's Inquiry, p. 21-2.) Judge Jay adduces an instance. William Tann, an overseer on a plantation, shot a slave. He was supposed to be a white, and the customary forms of trial before the COURT OF SESSIONS were in preparation, (before whom, as being a white man, he would undoubtedly have been cleared.) But "on an issue ordered and tried for ascertaining his caste, it was decided that he was of MIXED BLOOD." So he was 66 turned over by the Court to the jurisdiction of magistrates and freeholders, by whom he was sentenced to be hung. The particulars appeared in the Charleston Courier in 1835.

"The Corporation of Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, passed an ordinance, making it penal for any free negro to receive from the Post-office, have in his possession, or circulate, any publication or writing of a seditious character." (Jay's Inquiry, p. 23.)

"In North Carolina, the law prohibits a colored man, whatever may be his attainments or ecclesiastical authority, to preach the gospel." (Ib.)