[Footnote 36:  Charleston City Gazette, May 12, 1800.]

[Footnote 37:  E. g., Plantation and Frontier, II, 367.]

To procure the enforcement of such laws a vigilance committee was proposed at Natchez in 1824;[38] but if it was created it had no lasting effect.  With the same purpose newspaper campaigns were waged from time to time.  Thus in the spring of 1859 the Bulletin of Columbia, South Carolina, said editorially:  “Despite the laws of the land forbidding under penalty the hiring of their time by slaves, it is much to be regretted that the pernicious practice still exists,” and it censured the citizens who were consciously and constantly violating a law enacted in the public interest.  The nearby Darlington Flag endorsed this and proposed in remedy that the town police and the rural patrols consider void all tickets issued by masters authorizing their slaves to pass and repass at large, that all slaves found hiring their time be arrested and punished, and that their owners be indicted as by law provided.  The editor then ranged further.  “There is another evil of no less magnitude,” said he, “and perhaps the foundation of the one complained of.  It is that of transferring slave labor from its legitimate field, the cultivation of the soil, into that of the mechanic arts....  Negro mechanics are an ebony aristocracy into which slaves seek to enter by teasing their masters for permission to learn a trade.  Masters are too often seduced by the prospect of gain to yield their assent, and when their slaves have acquired a trade are forced to the violation of the law to realize their promised gain.  We should therefore have a law to prevent slave mechanics going off their masters’ premises to work.  Let such a law be passed, and ... there will no longer be need of a law to prohibit slaves hiring their own time,” The Southern Watchman of Athens, Georgia, reprinted all of this in turn, along with a subscriber’s communication entitled “free slaves.”  There were more negroes enjoying virtual freedom in the town of Athens, this writer said, than there were bona fide free negroes in any ten counties of the district.  “Everyone who is at all acquainted with the character of the slave race knows that they have great ideas of liberty, and in order to get the enjoyment of it they make large offers for their time.  And everyone who knows anything of the negro knows that he won’t work unless he is obliged to....  The negro thus set free, in nine cases out of ten, idles away half of his time or gambles away what he does make, and then relies on his ingenuity in stealing to meet the demands pay day inevitably brings forth; and this is the way our towns are converted into dens of rogues and thieves."[39]

[Footnote 38:  Natchez Mississippian, quoted in Le Courrier de la Louisiane (New Orleans), Aug. 25, 1854.]

[Footnote 39:  Southern Watchman (Athens, Ga.), Apr. 20, 1859.]