There can be no doubt but that many of the convicts thus imported, having served out their time, in a brief season became slave-drivers and slave-owners.  With hearts reduced to flinty hardness in the fires of unrestrained passions, the convict element, as it became absorbed in the great free white population of the Province,[425] created a most positive sentiment in favor of a cruel code for the government of the Negro slave.  There were two motives that inspired the ex-convict to cruelty to the Negro:  to divert attention from himself, and to persuade himself, in his doubting mind, that the Negro was inferior to him by nature.  It was, no doubt, a great undertaking; but the findings of such a court must have been comforting to an anxious conscience!  The result can be judged.  Maryland made a slave-code, which, for cruelty and general inhumanity, has no equal in the South.[426] The Maryland laws of 1715 contained, in chapter forty-four, an act with one hundred and thirty-five sections relating to Negro slaves.  A most rigorous pass-system was established.  By section six, no Negro or other servant was allowed to leave the county without a pass under the seal of the county in which their master resided; for which pass the slave or other servant was compelled to pay ten pounds of tobacco, or one shilling in money.  If such persons were apprehended, a justice of the peace could impose such fines and inflict such punishment as were fixed by the law applying to runaways.  By the Act of 1723, chapter fifteen, under the caption of “An Act to prevent the tumultuous meeting and other irregularities of negroes and other slaves,” the severity of the laws was increased tenfold.  According to section four, a Negro or other slave who had the temerity to strike a white person, was to have his ears “cropt on order of a Justice.”  Section six denies slaves the right of possession of property:  they could not own cattle.  Section seven gave authority to any white man to kill a Negro who resisted an attempt to arrest him; and by a supplemental Act of 1751, chapter fourteen, the owner of a slave thus killed was to be paid out of the public treasury.  In 1729 an Act was passed providing, that upon the conviction of certain crimes, Negroes and other slaves shall be not only hanged, but the body should be quartered, and exposed to public view.  When slaves grew old and infirm in the service of their masters, and the latter were inspired by a desire to compliment the faithfulness of their servants by emancipation, the law came in and forbade manumission by the “last will or testament,” or the making free in any way of Negro slaves.  It was a temporary Act, passed in 1752, void of every element of humanity; and yet it stood as the law of the colony for twenty long years.

In 1748 the Negro population of Maryland was thirty-six thousand, and still rapidly increasing.