dding 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.]

This act, supplemented by curfew and patrol laws and variously amended in
after years, as by the enhancement of penalties for negroes convicted of
striking white persons and by the requirement that masters provide adequate
food as well as clothing, was never repealed so long as slavery continued
to exist in South Carolina. Though its sumptuary clauses, along with
various others, were from first to last of no effect, the statute as a
whole so commended itself to the thought of slaveholding communities that
in 1770 Georgia made it the groundwork of her own slave police; Florida in
turn, by acts of 1822 and 1828, adopted the substance of the Georgia law
as revised to that period; and in lesser degree still other states gave
evidence of the same influence. Complementary legislation in all these
jurisdictions meanwhile recognized slaves as property, usually of chattel
character and with children always following the mother's condition,
debarred negro testimony in court in all cases where white persons were
involved, and declared the juridical incapacity of slaves in general except
when they were suing for freedom. Contemporaneously and by similar methods,
a parallel chain of laws, largely analogous to those here noted, was
extended from Virginia, herself a pioneer in slave legislation, to
Maryland, Delaware and North Carolina and in a fan-spread to the west as
far as Missouri and Texas.[4]

[Footnote 4: The beginning of Virginia's pioneer slave code has been
sketched in chapter IV above; and the slave legislation of the Northern
colonies and states in chapters VI and VII.]

Louisiana alone in all the Union, because of her origin and formative
experience as a Latin colony, had a scheme of law largely peculiar to
herself. The foundation of this lay in the _Code Noir_ decreed by Louis XV
for that colony in 1724. In it slaves were declared to be chatte