To dissuade masters from concealing the crimes of their negroes the magistrates were to appraise each capitally convicted slave, within a limit of L25, and to estimate also the damage to the person or property injured by the commission of the crime.  The colonial treasurer was then to take the amount of the slave’s appraisal from the public funds and after making reimbursement for the injury done, pay the overplus, if any, to the criminal’s owner.  If it appeared to the magistrates, however, that the crime had been prompted by the master’s neglect and the slave’s consequent necessity for sustenance, the treasurer was to pay the master nothing.  A master killing his own slave wantonly was to be fined L15, and any other person killing a slave illegally was to pay the master double the slave’s value, to be fined L25, and to give bond for subsequent good behavior.  If a slave were killed by accident the slayer was liable only to suit by the owner.  The destruction of a slave’s life or limb in the course of punishment by his master constituted no legal offense, nor did the killing of one by any person, when found stealing or attempting a theft by night.  Ascertained hiding places of runaway slaves were to be raided by constables and posses, and these were to be rewarded for taking the runaways alive or dead.[2] This act was thenceforward the basic law in the premises as long as slavery survived in the island.

[Footnote 2:  Richard Hall ed., Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados from 1643 to 1762 inclusive (London. 1764), pp. 112-121.]

South Carolina, in a sense the daughter of Barbados and in frequent communication with her, had enacted a series of specific laws of her own devising, when the growth of her slave population prompted the adoption of a general statute for negro police.  Thereupon in 1712 her assembly copied virtually verbatim the preamble and some of the ensuing clauses of the Barbadian act of 1688, and added further provisions drawn from other sources or devised for the occasion.  This served as her basic law until the shock of the Stono revolt in 1739 prompted the legislature to give the statute a greater elaboration in the following year.  The new clauses, aside from one limiting the work which might be required by masters to fourteen and fifteen hours per day in winter and summer respectively, and another forbidding all but servants in livery to wear any but coarse clothing, were concerned with the restraint of slaves, mainly with a view to the prevention of revolt.  No slaves were to be sold liquors without their masters’ approval; none were to be taught to write; no more than seven men in a group were to travel on the high roads unless in company with white persons; no houses or lands were to be rented to slaves, and no slaves were to be kept on any plantation where no white person was resident.[3]

[Footnote 3:  Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, VII, 408 ff.]