TÄTE IAVERY TATUTES - ProQuest

This statute was modified slightly in the revised çqde of 1819. A further revi-
sion of this law in 1837 gave the county courts the power to decide if a slave
could remain the the state after manumission. Finally, in 1852 the new state
Constitution resolved the issue, by firmly prohibiting emancipated slaves from
remaining in the state after gaining their freedom. This constitutional provi-
sion also prohibited the legislature from manumitting any slaves. Throughout
the period before 1852 the legislature passed numerous special acts or private
acts, emancipating some slaves and allowing particular blacks to remain in
the state after they were manumitted. These acts are only available through
the annual statutes.
Even scholars who have access to the annual statutes of a particular state
may be daunted by the sheer volume of the statutes and their apparent inac-
cessibility. Most state legislatures met annually or biennially. Full runs of the
statutes for some states contain over 85 volumes. These volumes are, almost
without exception, either unindexed or poorly indexed. The indexing is also
erratic. One year a state might index laws on free blacks under "free persons"
and another year under "Negroes." It is simply impossible to rely on the in-
dexes or even the tables of contents for this period.
In this project we have attempted to find and publish every statute passed
in the fifteen slave states that dealt with slavery, free blacks, and the broader
issue of race. We have included free blacks in this series because questions of
slavery were often indistinguishable from questions of race. Often legislation
affected both slaves and free blacks. We have also included some laws which
were directed solely at whites, but which indirectly affected slaves and free
blacks. To find every statute we have examined every page of every annual statute
book for the southern slave states from 1789 to 1865.
In putting this project together we have tried to be as complete as possible.
Thus, wherever the word slave or Negro has appeared, we have included the
statute, or relevant portions of it. We have also included private laws, special
acts, and legislative resolutions. Our goal is to provide scholars with a tool
for understanding how slavery affected the work of state legislatures during
the period under consideration. For short statutes, or those dealing entirely
or mostly with slavery and blacks, we have reproduced the entire act. For longer
acts, which are only partially concerned with slavery, we have adopted a dif-
ferent approach. With these acts we have filmed the first and last pages of
the act as well as the pages relevant to the subject of this series. This is impor-
tant because one must know the title of the act and the date on which it was
passed•information usually found at the beginning and end of the act. A
good example of such statutes are revenue acts, which provide for numerous
taxes, including levies on slaves.
Finally, we have often included the texts of state constitutions and subse-
quent revisions as they affected slavery. The constitutions are important because
they provided the political and legal basis for slavery within each state. Most
of these constitutions had provisions which directly or indirectly acknowledged
and protected slavery. In addition, the numerous nineteenth century state con-
stitutional changes directly affected slavery and race relations. For example,
before the 1830s free blacks were permitted to vote in North Carolina and Ten-
nessee. Constitutional changes in the mid-1830s eliminated this anomaly of
State Slavery Statutes ix