the Negro were not beset by the limitations subsequently fixed by the Federal Government. The first Civil Rights Bill, that of 1866, had not been passed. The Southern States were at liberty to enact such statutes as they thought proper and to draw upon their own experience and that of the free States with regard to free Negroes.
"BLACK LAWS" OF FREE STATES
These statutes of 1865-68 are here called the "Black Laws." This term was first applied to the laws of the border and Northern States passed before and up to the Civil War to fix the position of free persons of color. It is well to make a cursory examination of these laws of the free States, because they are prototypes of many of the statutes enacted by the Southern States while unhampered by Federal legislation. All the States, North as well as South, had previously faced the problem of the free Negro and made laws concerning him. Naturally, therefore, the South, now that all its Negroes were declared free, turned for precedents to the other States which had already had experience with the free Negro.
The following are some of the statutes that had been enacted with regard to free Negroes by States lying outside of what was later the Confederacy:
Maryland,[1] in 1846, denied Negroes, slave or free, the right to testify in cases in which any white person was concerned, though it permitted the testimony of slaves against free Negroes. The Constitution[2] of 1851 forbade the legislature to pass any law abolishing the relation of master and servant.
