All the laws relating to fugitive negroes refer to the number who were at large in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the evil was so crying in itself, and so likely to lead to worse consequences, that the most summary disposition of runaways; who refused to return to their masters by submitting to arrest, was allowed with the full concurrence of public sentiment.[1] As a slave could not be punished like a servant who had raised his hand against his master, by an extension of his term, his owner was permitted instead to inflict corporal punishment upon him. If he happened to die in consequence of the severity of this punishment, the master was not held to have been guilty of felony, it being the presumption of the law that the act was devoid of malice, as no man would voluntarily and intentionally destroy his own property. This law was one of the first indications in colonial legislation that the increasing importation of negroes was arousing apprehension among the planters of a possible outbreak on the part of the slaves. A still more unmistakable evidence of this feeling appears in a measure passed in 1680,[2] which was the reënactment in a more rigid form of the law of 1689,[3] prohibiting the use by a negro of all instruments of offence or defence, such as clubs, swords, guns, and staffs. If he raised a weapon to strike or shoot a Christian, whether his master or not, he was to be punished by the infliction of thirty lashes on his bare back. Twice during the course of each year the minister of each parish was required after the second lesson in the divine service to read this statute to his congregation,[4] and a failure to do so was an indictable offence.
No slave was allowed to leave the plantation of his master without a certificate of permission to go abroad,
