Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/140

 property qualification, women sole or covenant, males under the age of twenty-one years, and Popish recusants were denied the voting privilege, but no reference by way of exception is made to negro freeholders. That the free negro, mulatto, or Indian had been given the right of suffrage previous to 1723 is to be inferred from the provision adopted in that session that none of these persons should thereafter be allowed to enjoy it. It would seem to follow logically from the possession of this right by the negro freeman or freeholder, that he was permitted to perform many of the duties expected of white citizens in that age. He was certainly subject to its burdens, such, for instance, as the payment of county levies. In one case, a negro was appointed by the justices of Lancaster a beadle, but it was specially provided that his duties should be restricted to inflicting punishment by stripes on those whom the court should condemn to the lash.

There is no evidence to show that the free negroes of the seventeenth century exhibited as a mass any degree of thrift. It appears from the county records that the largest proportion of them were employed under the provisions of indentures similar to those by which the white servants were bound. Their general lack of prosperity was clearly revealed in the fact that one of the strongest reasons which led to the passage of the famous law of 1699, requiring the exportation of every African freeman within six months after he was emancipated, was that the manumitted slaves became in their old age a charge, upon