Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/398

 slaves resist, run away, or refuse to surrender, they may be lawfully killed and destroyed "by guns, or any other way whatsoever," the master, in such cases, to receive from the public four thousand pounds of tobacco for the loss of his slave.

Individual runaways seem at times to have made themselves formidable. We find, a few years later, an act setting forth that one Billy, a negro, slave to John Tillet, "has several years unlawfully absented himself from his master's service, lying out, and lurking in obscure places, supposed within the counties of James City, York, and Kent, devouring and destroying the stocks and crops, robbing the houses of, and committing and threatening other injuries to several of his majesty's good and liege people within this his colony and dominion of Virginia, in contempt of the good laws thereof;" wherefore the said Billy is declared by the act guilty of a capital offense; and "whosoever shall kill and destroy the said negro slave Billy, and apprehend and deliver him to justice," is to be rewarded with a thousand pounds of tobacco; and all persons entertaining him, or trading and trucking with him, are declared guilty of felony; his master, if he be killed, to receive as compensation from the public four thousand pounds of tobacco.

The same statute above cited for suppressing outlying slaves, contains the first provision to be found in the Virginia laws on the subject of the intermixture of the races: "For the prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another," any free white man or woman intermarrying with a negro, mulatto, or Indian, was to be forever banished — a punishment changed a few years after to six months' imprisonment and a fine of ten pounds. White women having mulatto children without marriage were to pay fifteen pounds sterling, or be sold for five years, that period, if they were servants, to take effect from the expiration of their former term, the child to be bound out as a servant till thirty years of age.

Another clause of this act placed a serious restraint upon emancipation, by enacting that no negro or mulatto slave shall be set free, unless the emancipator pay for his transportation, out of the country within six months. Yet the manumission was not void. The idea of reducing again to slavery persons once made free was not yet arrived at. A violation of the act exposed to a penalty of ten pounds, to be appropriated toward the transportation out of the colony of the freed slave.

The practice of special summary tribunals for the trial of slaves charged with crimes was now first introduced — another remarkable deviation from the English law. Any slave guilty of any offense punishable by the law of England with death or loss of member, was to be forthwith committed to the county jail, there to be kept "well laden with irons," and upon notice of the fact, the governor was to issue a commission to any persons of the county he might see fit, before whom the prisoner was to be arraigned, indicted, tried "without the solemnity of a jury," and on the oath of two witnesses, or one witness "with