The Free People of Color, though not in a condition of Chattelhood, are constantly 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 “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.)

     “In Georgia, a WHITE man is liable to a fine of five hundred dollars for teaching a FREE negro to read or write. If one free negro teach another, he is fined and whipped, at the discretion of the Court! Should a free negro presume to preach to or exhort his companions, he may be seized without warrant, and whipped thirty-nine lashes, and the same number of lashes may be applied to each one of his congregation. (Ib.)

     “In some States, free negroes may not assemble in greater number than seven. In North Carolina, free negroes may not trade, buy, or sell, out of the cities wherein they reside, under penalty of forfeiting their goods, and receiving, in lieu thereof, thirty-nine lashes! (Ib.)

     “In Ohio, [a free State,] not only are the blacks excluded from the benefit of public schools, but, with a refinement of cruelty unparalleled, they are doomed to idleness and poverty by a law which renders a white man who employs a colored one to labor for him for one hour, liable for his support through life.” (Ib. 24.)

     The Ohio law is, we believe, repealed. But in New-York, and some other Northern cities, colored persons are still denied licenses to drive carts, and pursue other similar avocations for a livelihood.

     In Indiana, a free State, the testimony of free negroes and mulattoes is not received against a white man. (Child’s Appeal, p. 66.)

     “By a late law of Maryland, a free negro coming into the State is liable to a fine of fifty dollars for

every week he remains in it! If he cannot pay the fine, he is SOLD!” (Jay’s Inquiry, p. 24.)

     “Should a colored citizen of Maryland cross its boundary, on business never so urgent to himself and his family, on returning home, more than a month after, he is liable to be seized and SOLD, unless, previous to his departure, he had complied with certain vexatious legal formalities, and which, from ignorance, he would be extremely likely to neglect, or perform imperfectly.” (Jay’s Inquiry, p. 90.)

     “A citizen of New-York, if he happens to be colored, may not visit a dying child in Maryland without incurring a penalty of fifty dollars for every week he remains; and if he is unable to pay the fine, why, then he is to be sold by the sheriff at public sale, for such a time as may be necessary to cover the aforesaid penalty. But if a free negro is sold for a limited time, he is in reality sold for life. During the term for which he is sold, he is sold as a chattel, and maybe transported at the pleasure of his master; and when the expiration of his term finds him in a cotton-field in Missouri, or a sugar-mill in Louisiana, who is to rescue him from interminable bondage?” (Jay’s Inquiry, p. 90.)

     It is known that such cases have occurred, and that free negroes taken up as fugitives in the Federal District have been sold to the slavetraders and sent to the far South. A case is narrated in a petition to Congress, signed by Judge Cranch and nearly eleven hundred citizens of the Federal District in 1828. And the advertisements of free negroes for sale by the

marshal and sheriff, appear frequently in the public journals. Mr. Miner, in the U. S. House of Representatives, in 1829, stated that in 1826-7 no less than five persons in the Federal District were thus sold into perpetual bondage for jail fees! (Jay’s Inquiry, p. 155.)

     “A free colored man living near the line of the District of Columbia, petitioned the House of Delegates of Maryland for leave to bring his grandchild from the city of Washington. The child had probably been left an orphan, and he naturally wished to take it to his own house. The petition was rejected.” (Jay’s Inquiry, p. 90.)

     “In North Carolina, free negroes are whipped, fined, and imprisoned, at the discretion of the Court, for intermarrying with slaves.” (Child’s Appeal, p. 70.)

     In Georgia, “Any person of color, bond or free, is forbidden to occupy any tenement except a kitchen or outhouse, under penalty of from twenty to fifty lashes. Some of these laws are applicable only to particular cities, towns, or counties; others to several counties.” (Ib.)

     “Emancipated slaves must quit North Carolina in ninety days after their enfranchisement, on pain of being sold for life. Free persons who shall ‘migrate into’ the State may be seized and sold as runaway slaves; and if they ‘migrate out’ of the State for more than ninety days, they can never return, under the same penalty.” “A visit to relatives in another State may be called ‘migrating;’ being taken up and

detained by kidnappers over ninety days may be called ‘migrating.’” (Ib., p. 68.)

     In all the seaport cities and towns of the slave States there are regulations forbidding masters of merchant-vessels to land any free colored person. And if any seaman, cook, or steward in such vessel be colored, he is immediately seized, (though a citizen of one of the free States,) and kept in jail at the expense of the ship, until she is ready to sail. This is a great grievance, not only to such colored seamen, but to the ship masters and ship owners. It is also a direct and palpable violation of the Constitution of the United States.

     The Legislature of South Carolina, in Dec. 1822, by express statute, ordained the enforcement of this usage, by providing that, in case the ship master should refuse paying the expense of the seaman’s imprisonment, he may be “indicted and fined not less than one thousand dollars, and imprisoned not less than two months, and such free negroes shall be sold as slaves. The Circuit Court of the United States adjudged the law unconstitutional and void. Yet nearly two years after this decision, four colored seamen were taken out of the English brig Marmion. England made a formal complaint to our Government. Mr. Wirt, the Attorney-general, gave the opinion that the law was unconstitutional. This, as well as the above-mentioned decision, excited strong indignation in South Carolina. Notwithstanding the decision, the law still remains in force.” (Child’s Appeal, p. 63.)

     “North Carolina has made a law, subjecting any vessel with free colored persons on board to thirty days’ quarantine, as if freedom were as bad as the cholera! Any person of color coming on shore from such vessels is seized and imprisoned till the vessel departs, and the captain is fined five hundred dollars; and if he refuse to take the colored seaman away, and pay the expenses of his imprisonment, he is fined five hundred more. If the sailor do not depart within ten days after the captain’s refusal, he must be whipped thirty-nine lashes; and all colored persons, bond or free, who communicate with him, receive the same.” (Ib., p. 69.)

     “In Georgia there is a similar enactment. The prohibition is, in both States, confined to merchant-vessels; (it would be imprudent to meddle with vessels-of-war;) and any person communicating with such seaman is whipped not exceeding thirty lashes. If the captain refuse to carry away seamen thus detained, and pay the expenses o£ their imprisonment, he is fined five hundred dollars, and also imprisoned not exceeding three months.” (Ib.)

     The State of Massachusetts sent an agent to South Carolina, and another to Louisiana, to see what adjustment could be made of the difficulties growing out of these enactments. But they were both promptly ejected from those States, laden with insults, and gladly hastened their escape, to save their lives!

     A most comprehensive class of oppressive enactments against the free people of color, are those

designed and operating, directly or indirectly, TO DRIVE THEM OUT OF THE COUNTRY! Some of the enactments mentioned already, particularly those of Maryland, are known to have had this end in view, and to have been instigated by the leading influences seeking their expulsion to Africa!

     A favorite scheme of the Virginia slaveholders, at an early day, was to enlist Congress in the enterprise of colonizing the free blacks in Africa, for the better security of the slave system at home. Soon after the alarms of a suspected or attempted insurrection of slaves, the proposition was formally brought forward. It proved a failure; whereupon the leaders of the movement, members of Congress and others, organized the American Colonization Society, which has its auxiliaries in most of the States, North and South. At the North, it has been advocated as an ally of emancipation; at the South, as the grand conservator of the slave system; in both sections, it has infused the sentiment that there must or can be no emancipations, unless connected with transportation to Africa; that it is impossible for the colored race to enjoy the rights of freemen in this country; and that the whites and blacks cannot live together in peace, in the enjoyment of equal rights! Into the history or the merits of this Society we cannot here enter, any further than is necessary in order to understand the State legislation, Southern and Northern, designed to harass and oppress the free blacks, and drive them out of the country. The constitution of the Society restricts

it to the colonization of free colored people, with their own free consent. But it is a well-established fact, that many of its leading members have contemplated, whenever practicable, the employment of force. The reader is referred to Jay’s “Inquiry” for abundant evidence of this. And the same class of persons have been busily engaged in promoting legislation against the free people of color, both in the slave and the free States. On many occasions, the auxiliary Colonization Societies, their agents and their public speakers, have explicitly justified and sanctioned those oppressive enactments. And the official organ of the Parent Society (the African Repository) has given systematic circulation to those injurious and slanderous aspersions of this much-injured class, upon which the legislative persecution of them has been based. (See Jay’s Inquiry, p. 18, &c.) In the preceding chapter, we have quoted an instance of direct approbation of those laws by an auxiliary Society, and will here acid one more. The New-York State Colonization Society, in a memorial to the State Legislature, said: “We do not ask that the provisions of our Constitution and Statute Book should be so modified as to RELIEVE AND EXALT the condition of the colored people whilst they remain with us. Let these provisions stand, IN ALL THEIR RIGOR, to work out the ultimate and unbounded good of this people!” That is, by compelling them to be colonized, or remain oppressed and degraded!

     In Connecticut, in 1833, the leading colonizationists

procured a legislative enactment against schools for colored pupils, avowedly for the purpose of breaking up the school of Miss Prudence Crandall, at Canterbury. Under that enactment she was prosecuted, and being unable to procure bail, was committed to prison, but was bailed out the next day. At her trial, before Judge Daggett, a verdict was given against her. The cause was removed to the Court of Errors, where all the proceedings were set aside on technical grounds.” Miss Crandall’s school was afterwards broken up by a mob; and the gentleman who had been most active in procuring the passage of the “back act” against the education of free negroes (Mr. A. T. Judson) was appointed agent and orator of the Windham County Colonization Society. We record the facts, in evidence that enactments against the free people of color are not a dead letter, but are procured and sustained by the leading influences in the Church and the State, at the North and the South.

     In Philadelphia, in New-York city, and in other places, meetings of the Colonization Society, in which Doctors of Divinity, statesmen, and jurists have declaimed vehemently against the free people of color, denied their right to a home in the land of their birth, and justified the oppressive statutes against them, have been immediately followed by frightful riots against the proscribed class, in which their dwellings have been demolished, their churches broken open and injured, their persons assaulted, and numbers of them, in one instance, killed! And

no legal protection nor redress has been extended to them! These scenes have been uniformly followed by special efforts to induce them to be colonized in Liberia “with their own free consent”!!!

     The Virginia and Maryland auxiliaries to the American Colonization Society have sought and obtained appropriations from the Legislatures of those States, under circumstances that virtually involved compulsion. The original bill (in the Virginia Legislature) making the appropriation “contained a clause for the compulsory transportation of free blacks.” (Jay’s Inq., p. 50.) On a motion to strike out the compulsory clause, Mr. Brodnox opposed it, saying: “IT IS IDLE TO TALK OF NOT RESORTING TO FORCE. Every body must look to the employment of force of some kind or other! If the free negroes are willing to go, they will go. If not willing, they must be compelled to go. Some gentlemen think it politic not now to insert this feature in the bill, THOUGH THEY PROCLAIM THEIR READINESS TO RESORT TO IT WHEN NECESSARY; they think that for a year or two a sufficient number will consent to go, AND THEN THE REST CAN BE COMPELLED. For my part, I deem it better to approach the question at once, and settle it openly. The intelligent portion of the free negroes know very well what is going on. Will they not see that coercion is ultimately to be resorted to? I have already expressed my opinion that few, very few, will voluntarily consent to emigrate if no compulsory measures be adopted. Without it, you will still, no doubt, have applicants for removal, equal to

your means. Yes, Sir. People will not only consent, but beg you to deport them! But what sort of consent? A consent extorted by a species of oppression calculated to render their situation among us insupportable! Many of those who have been already sent off went with their avowed consent, but under the influence of a more decided compulsion than any which this bill holds out. I will not express in its fullest extent the idea I entertain of what has been done, or what enormities will be perpetrated to induce this class of persons to leave the State.”

     Mr. B. proceeded to describe, at length, the process of obtaining “consent” by a series of “flagellations,” and then said:

     “I have certainly heard (if incorrectly, the gentleman from Southampton will put me right) that all the large cargo of emigrants lately transported from that country to Liberia, all of whom professed to be willing to go, were rendered so by some such ministration as I have described.” (Jay’s Inq., pp. 50-1.)

     Mr. Fisher expressed similar sentiments. The compulsory clause was, however, stricken out. The result justified the prediction of Messrs. Brodnax and Fisher.

     “I warned the managers against this Virginia business,” (said Rev. R. J. Breckenridge,) “and yet they sent out two ship-loads of vagabonds, not fit to go to such a place, and that were coerced away as truly as if it had been done by a cart-whip.” (Speech before the Society. Jay’s Inq., p. 51-2.) Dr. Breckenridge, it is believed, has since declared himself openly

in favor of compulsory colonization, with a view, perhaps, of avoiding the worse “enormities” described by Mr. Brodnax.

     The “’Maryland Colonization Society” having, at length, (in 1841,) openly defined its position, we let it speak for itself, in its own language. We have the account from a Baltimore paper. The meeting was held in the Light Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Bishop WAUGH in the chair, and the meeting opened with prayer! The declaration is as follows:

     “That while it is most earnestly hoped that the free colored people of Maryland may see that their best and most permanent interests will be consulted by their emigration from this State; and while this Convention would deprecate any departure from the principle which makes colonization dependent upon the voluntary action of the free colored people themselves; yet if, regardless of what has been done to provide them with an asylum, they continue to persist in remaining in Maryland, in the hope of enjoying here an equality of social and political rights, they ought to be solemnly WARNED that, in the opinion of this Convention, a day must arrive when circumstances that cannot be controlled, and which are now maturing, WILL DEPRIVE THEM OF THE FREEDOM OF CHOICE, and leave them no alternative but removal.”

     And this is what is meant by colonizing the free people of color with their own consent! The Maryland Colonization Society, with a Bishop presiding,

and with its meeting opened by prayer, have openly taken a position that the Legislature of Virginia, from a remaining sense of decency, could not be persuaded to avow!

     A Florida slaveholder wrote “A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Slavery,” in which he says “Colonization in Africa has been proposed to the free colored people, to forward which, a general system of persecution against them, upheld from the pulpit, has been legalized throughout the Southern States.” (Jay’s Inq., p. 49.) That “Florida slaveholder” (if we mistake not the person) has good cause to feel the injustice he describes. His only heirs are “free people of color,” his own children, for whom he has obtained an education among the abolitionists of the North! We see in this, one of the many ways in which the wrongs of the colored race are visited upon their white oppressors.

     The constitutions and statutes of free States debarring their free colored citizens from eligibility to office, and from equal access to the ballot-box, are among the most marked and mischievous specimens of injury to the colored race. It is this that sustains the slave States in their oppression of both the bond and the free. And of this iniquitous legislation at the North, the negro pew and the corresponding treatment of negroes in seminaries of learning controlled by the Church are the principal supports. A Legislative Committee, in the State of New-York, alleged this as the reason why the policy of the State could not be changed. Social customs, placing

colored people out of the pale of refined society, come under the same censure. How much better, on the whole, are the PEOPLE than their LAWS, whether at the North or at the South?

     The picture presented in this chapter contrasts strikingly with the condition of the free people of color in the British West Indies before emancipation, and at the time it took place. That event, if we are rightly informed, found the free colored people in the enjoyment of civil and political rights, some of them editors of public journals, and holders of municipal office.

     But such a condition of things, it may be said, could not consist with the perpetuity of West Indian slavery, and may account for its termination. Be it so. Our slaveholders undoubtedly think so. The whole system of persecuting and of attempting to drive away the free people of color to Africa, has its origin in this apprehension. The main object is the perpetuity of slavery. The fugitive slave bill is chiefly designed and relied upon to frighten the free colored people of the free States out of the country! This is its chief power!

     The “innocent legal relation of slave ownership” comes in again here, as the responsible parent of all the oppressive enactments recorded in this chapter.