Colored persons found without free papers may be arrested as runaway slaves, and after two months' notice, if no claimant appears, must be advertised ten days, and sold to pay their jail fees.[1]—Stroud, 85, note.
The city of Washington grants a license to trade in slaves, for profit, as agent, or otherwise, for four hundred dollars.—City Laws, p. 249.
Reader, you uphold these laws while you do nothing for their repeal. You can do much. You can take and read the anti-slavery journals. They will give you an impartial history of the cause, and arguments with which to convert its enemies. You can countenance and aid those who are laboring for its promotion. You can petition against slavery; you can refuse to vote for slaveholders or pro-slavery men, constitutions and compacts; can abstain from products of slave labor; and can use your social influence to spread right principles and awaken a right feeling. Be as earnest for freedom as its foes are for slavery, and you can diffuse an anti-slavery sentiment through your whole neighborhood, and merit "the blessing of them that are ready to perish."
The following is from the old colonial law of North Carolina:
Notice of the commitment of runaways— viz., 1741, c. 24, § 29. "An act concerning servants and slaves."
Copy of notice containing a full description of such runaway and his clothing.—The sheriff is to "cause a copy of such notice to be sent to the clerk or reader of each church or chapel within his county, who are hereby required to make
- ↑ The prisons of the district, built with the money of the nation, are used as store-houses of the slaveholder's human merchandize. "From the statement of the keeper of a jail at Washington, it appears that in five years, upwards of 450 colored persons were committed to the national prison in that city, for safe-keeping, i. e., until they could be disposed of in the course of the slave trade, besides nearly 300 who had been taken up as runaways."—Miner's Speech in II Rep., 1829
