The uniquely full view which may be had of the trend of serious crimes among the Virginia slaves is due to the preservation of vouchers filed in pursuance of a law of that state which for many decades required appraisal and payment by the public for all slaves capitally convicted and sentenced to death or deportation.  The file extends virtually from 1780 to 1864, except for a gap of three years in the late 1850’s.[8] The volume of crime rose gradually decade by decade to a maximum of 242 in the 1820’s, and tended to decline slowly thereafter.  The gross number of convictions was 1,418, all but 91 of which were of males.  For arson there were 90 slaves convicted, including 29 women.  For burglary there were 257, with but one woman among them.  The highway robbers numbered 15, the horse thieves 20, and the thieves of other sorts falling within the purview of the vouchers 24, with no women in these categories.  It would be interesting to know how the slaves who stole horses expected to keep them undiscovered, but this the vouchers fail to tell.

[Footnote 8:  The MS. vouchers are among the archives in the Virginia State Library.  They have been statistically analyzed by the present writer, substantially as here follows, in the American Historical Review, XX, 336-340.]

For murder there were 346, discriminated as having been committed upon the master 56, the mistress 11, the overseer 11; upon other white persons 120; upon free negroes 7; upon slaves 85, including 12 children all of whom were killed by their own mothers; and upon persons not described 60.  Of the murderers 307 were men and 39 women.  For poisoning and attempts to poison, including the administering of ground glass, 40 men and 16 women were convicted, and there were also convictions of one man and one woman for administering medicine to white persons.  For miscellaneous assault there were 111 sentences recorded, all but eight of which were laid upon male offenders and only two of which were described as having been directed against colored victims.

For rape there were 73 convictions, and for attempts at rape 32.  This total of 105 cases was quite evenly distributed in the tale of years; but the territorial distribution was notably less in the long settled Tidewater district than in the newer Piedmont and Shenandoah.  The trend of slave crime of most other sorts, however, ran squarely counter to this; and its notably heavier prevalence in the lowlands gives countenance to the contemporary Southern belief that the presence of numerous free negroes among them increased the criminal proclivities of the slaves.  In at least two cases the victims of rape were white children; and in two others, if one be included in which the conviction was strangely of mere “suspicion of rape,” they were free mulatto women.  That no slave women were mentioned among the victims is of course far from proving that these were never violated, for such offenses appear to have been left largely to the private cognizance of the masters.[9] A Delaware instance of the sort attained record through an offer of reward for the capture of a slave who had run away after being punished.