Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/132

 upon his or her back was followed by imprisonment, which continued until the costs were paid and security for good behavior was given. In 1693, an action of trespass was brought in the county court of York by a well-known planter named Sampson and his wife against a negress and her husband, on the ground that they had made a violent attack upon the person of Mrs. Sampson and threatened to take her life. Of this offence, the negress was convicted. She was whipped by the sheriff of the county until she had received twenty-nine lashes, and was then thrown into jail to remain until she could find some one to go on her bond to keep the peace. Her character was considered to be so dangerous and her life so disorderly, that the court entered a rule that unless she could show that her claim to freedom was capable of the most irrefutable proof, she should be transported from the Colony. Not being able to show this, she was sent out of Virginia as a person whose presence was calculated to disturb the peace of the community. When the act of the slave amounted only to a menace, the person who was the object of this menace could compel the master of the negro to give bond as a security for his good behavior.

The petty offences of negroes involving the interests of their masters only were dealt with in the seventeenth century in the same manner, as a rule, as they were in the eighteenth and nineteenth, their owners being allowed to inflict such punishment as appeared to them to her advisable. An exception seems to have been made in the case of hog-stealing. Upon the commission of the first offence of this kind, the slave was soundly whipped, and for the second, his ears were nailed to the pillory and afterwards