of dismembered and cauterized slaves.187    Later reenactments referred only to servants,
although they may have applied to slaves as well. If a servant's offense was serious, the master
could take the servant to county court for punishment up to thirty-nine lashes. All controversies
were raised by petition, but no county court was to be reversed for want of judicial process, lack
of a jury, or any other matter of form, provided that the defendant was legally summoned and not
condemned unheard.188     This restriction on appeals has meant that little has been done in
discovering the practice of the county courts in these cases. A number of servants' petitions were
heard and resulted in actions against the master; but other than the petition of Courtney's mulatto
servant, there are no noted petitions of slaves.189    Either the statute did not apply to slaves or the
white neighbors of the slave owner were unwilling to interfere in the behavior of masters toward
slaves.

Despite the whip and the support of the legal system, masters were often forced to use
incentives to encourage labor. Slaves might be permitted their own garden, they could get
bonuses and other possessions, and they might secure privileges such as hunting, visiting
relatives and participating in other social gatherings.190 In short, the conditions of life on a given
plantation reflected a modus vivendi. a compromise in which the master had the most powerful
bargaining chips but could not control the relationship. At first the law merely supported the
master's power to license his slave's activity, but eventually it even restricted what the master
could permit.

The 1715 codification included a provision taken from earlier laws which prohibited
trading with a servant or slave without license from the servant's master, fearing that unlicensed
trading signaled theft of the master's property.191   The slave accused of theft was initially treated
like any other person accused of such a crime, but in 1713 the Committee of Aggrievances in the
Lower House of the General Assembly noted that the arrest of slaves for petty theft and detention
until the next meeting of the county court "burthens the Counties by paying the several Officers
ffees accruing by occasion thereof they being slaves and not capable of making any satisfaction
by Servitude or otherwise either to the County for their ffees or to their Masters for the Loss of
their Service."192   This objection was met in 1717 by permitting a single justice of the peace to
try any "Negro, Indian or Mullatto Slave" for small crimes punishable by whipping not
exceeding forty lashes.193    All other persons committing such a crime had a right to be tried by
the County Court.

hi 1723, apparently fearing that slave ownership ofparticularly valuable property could
serve as a shield for or an encouragement to the theft of such property, the legislature prohibited
masters from permitting their slaves to keep a horse or cattle.194  This law deprived slaves of the
most important mode of transportation and thus curtailed opportunities for escape. It prevented
masters from supporting slave claims to horses and cattle. Thus, in order to discourage flight and
theft, the master was prevented from providing his slaves with a major avenue of both
convenience and

economic advancement. One final, relatively trivial, limit on the power of slaves to
engage in trade or ownership even with their master's permission was a 1747 law protecting the

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