e somewhat vitiated by the
animus of their authors.

The many statutes concerning slavery enacted in the several colonies,
territories and states are listed and many of them summarized in J.C. Hurd,
_The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States_ (Boston, 1858), I,
228-311; II, 1-218. Some hundreds of court decisions in the premises are
given in J.D. Wheeler, _A Practical Treatise on the Law of Slavery_
(New York and New Orleans, 1837); and all the thousands of decisions of
published record are briefly digested in _The Century Edition of the
American Digest_, XLIV (St. Paul, 1903), 853-1152.

The development of the slave code in Virginia is traced in J.C. Ballagh,
_A History of Slavery in Virginia_ (Baltimore, 1902), supplemented by J.H.
Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_ (Baltimore, 1913); and the legal
regime of slavery in South Carolina at the middle of the nineteenth century
is described by Judge J.B. O'Neall in _The Industrial Resources of the
Southern and Western States_, J.B.D. DeBow ed., II (New Orleans, 1853),
269-292.]

As a rule each slaveholding colony or state adopted early in its career
a series of laws of limited scope to meet definite issues as they were
successively encountered. Then when accumulated experience had shown a
community that it had a general problem of regulation on its hands its
legislature commonly passed an act of many clauses to define the status of
slaves, to provide the machinery of their police, and to prescribe legal
procedure in cases concerning them whether as property or as persons.
Thereafter the recourse was again to specific enactments from time to
time to supplement this general or basic statute as the rise of new
circumstances or policies gave occasion. The likeness of conditions in the
several communities and the difficulty of devising laws to comply with
intricate custom and at the same time to guard against apprehended ills led
to much intercolonial and interstate borrowing of statutes. A perfect chain
of this sort, with each link a basic police law for slaves in a separate
colony or state, extended from Barbados through the southeastern trio of
commonwealths on the continent. The island of Barbados, as we have seen,
was the earliest of the permanent English settlements in the tropics and
one of the first anywhere to attain a definite regime of plantations
with negro labor. This made its assembly perforce a pioneer in slave
legislation. After a dozen minor laws