r 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 simi