Phil Cooper, of Gloucester County, in 1828 was the chattel slave of his free wife.  Janette Wood of Richmond was manumitted in 1795 by her mother, “natural love” being the only consideration named in the legal instrument.  John Sabb, of Richmond, purchased in 1801 his aged father-in-law Julius and for the nominal consideration of five shillings executed a deed of manumission.[14]

Purchases of this kind before 1806 were usually followed immediately by manumission of the slave.  Scattered through the deeds and wills of Virginia County records in the quarter century ending with 1806 are to be found numerous documents of which the following is an example: 

To all whom these presents may come know ye, that I Peter Hawkins a free black man of the city of Richmond having purchased my wife Rose, a slave about twenty-two years of age and by her have had a child called Mary now about 18 mo. old, for the love I bear toward my wife and child have thought proper to emancipate them and for the further consideration of five shillings to me in hand paid ...  I emancipate and set free the said Rose and Mary and relinquish all my right ... as slaves to the said Rose and Mary.

     Peter Hawkins (seal)[15]

Indeed the kindness of free Negroes toward their friends and relatives seeking freedom afforded such an accessible avenue to liberty that those vigilant white citizens who desired to preserve the institution of slavery deemed it necessary to put obstructions in the way.  A law which required any slave manumitted after May 1, 1806 to leave the State within the space of twelve months was passed in 1806 and remained in force until the war rendered it obsolete.  Forfeiture of freedom was the penalty for refusal to accept banishment.  From this act dates the beginning of this benevolent type of slavery.  Free Negroes continued to purchase their relatives but held them as slaves, refusing to decree their banishment by executing a deed or will of manumission.

A pathetic example of this kind was the case of Negro Daniel Webster of Prince William County.  At the age of sixty when an illness forced him to the conclusion that life was short, he sent a petition to the legislature saying that he had thus far avoided the evil consequences of the law of 1806 by retaining his family in nominal slavery but that then he faced the alternative of manumitting his family to see it disrupted and banished or of holding his slave family together till his death, when its members like other property belonging to his estate would be sold as slaves to masters of a different type.  He begged that exception be made to the law of 1806 in the case of his wife and children so that he might feel at liberty to manumit them.[16]

A similar petition to the Legislature in 1839 by Ermana, a slave woman, stated that her husband and owner had been a free man of color, that he had died intestate and that she, her children and her property had escheated to the literary fund.  Scores of similar petitions to the Legislature for special acts of relief tell the story of how black men and women who owned members of their families neglected too long to remove from them the status of property.