BLACKS BEFORE THE LAW IN COLONIAL MARYLAND
Ross Kimmel
1 Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston, 1957), pp. 8-9.
2 Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), pp. 53-56, 61-62.
3 Englishment commonly accepted the idea that certain disadvantaged people ("as the dull and the blockish") were naturally the servants of the more able ("the quicker of wit and understanding"). See John Weemes, The Portraiture of the Image of God in Man (London, 1627), p. 278. Swinburne meant that slavery was not even this form of "natural" servitude.
4 Henry Swinburne, A Briefe Treatise on Willies and Last Testaments (London, 1611), p. 47. Jordan cited a 1590 edition in White over Black, p. 53, n. 15.
5 Swinburne, Briefe Treatise, p. 47.
6Henry Smith, The Sermons of Master Henry Smith (London, 1611), p. 40. The Company of Providence Island shared the view that infidels could be enslaved when, in 1635, they admonished their antislavery governor, Samuel Rishworth, to cease aiding the flights of unbaptized black slaves. The company expressed it as a "groundless opinion that Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state of servitude during their strangeness from Christianity." [Great Britain Public Record Office] Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, ed. William Noel Sansbury et al. (in progress; London, 1860 to date), I, 202; Arthur P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans: The Last Phase of the Elizabethan Struggle with Spain (New Haven and London, 1914), p. 149.
9Paul Baynes, An Entire Commentary upon the Whole Epistle of Apostle Paul to the Ephesians, 5th ed. (London, 658), p. 554.
10Weemes, Portraiture, p. 279.
11As quoted by Ulrich B. Phillips, Plantation and Frontier Documents: 1649-1862, 2 vols. (Cleveland, 1910), I, p. 342.
12Archives of Maryland, ed. William Hand Browne et al. (in progress; Baltimore, 1883 to date), I, pp. 264-265 (hereafter cited Archives Md.).
13Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1628), p. 116.
14Paul C. Palmer, "Servant into Slave: The Evolution of the Legal Status of the Negro Laborer in Colonial Virginia," The South Atlantic Quarterly, LXV (1966), pp. 358, 361.
15[Maryland Provincial] Patents, Liber 1, p. 37, Maryland State Archivers, Annapolis, Maryland (hereafter abbreviated MdSA).
17George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, 2 vols. (1883; rpt. New York, 1968), I, 239; Handlin, Race and Nationality, pp. 15-16; Carl Degler, "Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice," Comparative Studies in Society and History, II (1959), p. 56; Jordan, White over Black, pp. 74-75.
18Jonathan Alpert, "The Origins of Slavery in the United States--The Maryland Precedent," The American Journal of Legal History, XIV (1970), pp. 190-191.
20Ibid., p. 409. The Assembly revised this law twice before the end of the century. In both revisions, the clause excepting slaves remained unchanged. See Archives Md., I, pp. 453-454 (1662); II, pp. 335-336 (1671).
22Jordan, White over Black, p. 77.
23John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or, The Two Fruitful Sisters Virginia and Maryland (1656; rpt. in Clayton C. Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633-1684 [New York, 1910], pp. 281-308), pp. 290-291. At the time he wrote, Hammond claimed to have been a twenty-one year resident of Virginia and Maryland.
24After several experiments to establish the exact ages at which various classes of inhabitants should be taxable, the Assembly finally decided in 1676 that all white males and all slaves would be subject to the poll tax between the ages of sixteen and sixty. See Archives Md., I, p. 449 (1662); II, pp. 135-136 (1666), p. 399 (1674), pp. 538-539 (1676); XIII, p. 538 (a 1692 reenactment of the 1676 law). Virginia had initiated such tax discrimination in 1643. See Jordan, White over Black, p. 77.
26Eugene McCormac estimated that indentured servants in Maryland at this time brought £15-20 sterling in his White Servitude in Maryland, 1634-1820, Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 22, nos. 3-4 (Baltimore, 1904), p. 42. Abbot Smith accepted McCormac's figures in his Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776 (Chapel Hill, 1947), p. 38.
27Archives Md., XLI, pp. 261-262.
28[Maryland Provincial] Testamentary Proceedings, vol. I (1657-1666), p. 37 (in the third run of numbered pages), MdSA. Second and subsequent references to the same class of records will appear in shortened form (e.g., TP/1, p. 37. MdSA).
29TP/1, p. 24 (second run of numbered pages), MdSA.
30TP/1, p. 85 (third run of numbered pages), MdSA, manuscript partially obscured.
31Archives Md. XLI, p. 587 (1661); XLIX, p. 179 (1663), p. 205 (1664), p. 363 (1664); LIII, p. 238 (1662); TP/1, p. 66 (third run of numbered pages), MdSA.
32Alpert, "The Origins of Slavery," pp. 193-194.
33Archives Md., XLI, pp. 499-500.
34Archives Md., I, pp. 463-465; XLI, pp. 515-516, original manuscript partially blotted.
35Archives Md., XLI, pp. 476-478.
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