The uniquely full view which may be had of the trend of serious crimes among the Virginia slaves is due to the preservation of vouchers filed in pursuance of a law of that state which for many decades required appraisal and payment by the public for all slaves capitally convicted and sentenced to death or deportation. The file extends virtually from 1780 to 1864, except for a gap of three years in the late 1850's.[8] The volume of crime rose gradually decade by decade to a maximum of 242 in the 1820's, and tended to decline slowly thereafter. The gross number of convictions was 1,418, all but 91 of which were of males. For arson there were 90 slaves convicted, including 29 women. For burglary there were 257, with but one woman among them. The highway robbers numbered 15, the horse thieves 20, and the thieves of other sorts falling within the purview of the vouchers 24, with no women in these categories. It would be interesting to know how the slaves who stole horses expected to keep them undiscovered, but this the vouchers fail to tell.
[Footnote 8: The MS. vouchers are among the archives in the Virginia State Library. They have been statistically analyzed by the present writer, substantially as here follows, in the American Historical Review, XX, 336-340.]
For murder there were 346, discriminated as having been committed upon the master 56, the mistress 11, the overseer 11; upon other white persons 120; upon free negroes 7; upon slaves 85, including 12 children all of whom were killed by their own mothers; and upon persons not described 60. Of the murderers 307 were men and 39 women. For poisoning and attempts to poison, including the administering of ground glass, 40 men and 16 women were convicted, and there were also convictions of one man and one woman for administering medicine to white persons. For miscellaneous assault there were 111 sentences recorded, all but eight of which were laid upon male offenders and only two of which were described as having been directed against colored victims.
For rape there were 73 convictions, and for attempts at rape 32. This total of 105 cases was quite evenly distributed in the tale of years; but the territorial distribution was notably less in the long settled Tidewater district than in the newer Piedmont and Shenandoah. The trend of slave crime of most other sorts, however, ran squarely counter to this; and its notably heavier prevalence in the lowlands gives countenance to the contemporary Southern belief that the presence of numerous free negroes among them increased the criminal proclivities of the slaves. In at least two cases the victims of rape were white children; and in two others, if one be included in which the conviction was strangely of mere "suspicion of rape," they were free mulatto women. That no slave women were mentioned among the victims is of course far from proving that these were never violated, for such offenses appear to have been left largely to the private cognizance of the masters.[9] A Delaware instance of the sort attained record through an offer of reward for the capture of a slave who had run away after being punished.
[Footnote 9: Elkton (Md.) Press, July 19, 1828, advertisement, reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 122.]
For insurrection or conspiracy 91 slaves were convicted, 36 of them in Henrico County in 1800 for participation in Gabriel's revolt, 17 in 1831, mainly in Southampton County as followers of Nat Turner, and the rest mostly scattering. Among miscellaneous and unclassified cases there was one slave convicted of forgery, another of causing the printing of anti-slavery writings, and 301 sentenced without definite specification of their crimes. Among the vouchers furthermore are incidental records of the killing of a slave in 1788 who had been proclaimed an outlaw, and of the purchase and manumission by the commonwealth of Tom and Pharaoh in 1801 for services connected with the suppression of Gabriel's revolt.
As to punishments, the vouchers of the eighteenth century are largely silent, though one of them contains the only unusual sentence to be found in the whole file. This directed that the head of a slave who had murdered a fellow slave be cut off and stuck on a pole at the forks of the road. In the nineteenth century only about one-third of the vouchers record execution. The rest give record of transportation whether under the original sentences or upon commutation by the governor, except for the cases which from 1859 to 1863 were more numerous than any others where the commutations were to labor on the public works.
The statistics of rape in Virginia, and the Georgia cases already given, refute the oft-asserted Southern tradition that negroes never violated white women before slavery was abolished. Other scattering examples may be drawn from contemporary newspapers. One of these occurred at Worcester, Massachusetts in 1768.[10] Upon conviction the negro was condemned to death, although a white man at the same time found guilty of an attempt at rape was sentenced merely to sit upon the gallows. In Georgia the governor issued a proclamation in 1811 offering reward for the capture of Jess, a slave who had ravished the wife of a citizen of Jones County;[11] and in 1844 a jury in Habersham County, after testimony by the victim and others, found a slave named Dave guilty of rape upon Hester An Dobbs, "a free white female in the peace of God and state of Georgia," and the criminal was duly hanged by the sheriff.[12] In Alabama in 1827 a negro was convicted of rape at Tuscaloosa,[13] and another in Washington County confessed after capture that while a runaway he had met Miss Winnie Caller, taken her from her horse, dragged her into the woods and butchered her "with circumstances too horrible to relate";[14] and at Mobile in 1849 a slave named Ben was sentenced to death for an attempt at rape upon a white woman.[15] In Rapides Parish, Louisiana, in 1842, a young girl was dragged into the woods, beaten and violated. Her injuries caused her death next day. The criminal had been caught when the report went to press.[16]
[Footnote 10: Boston Chronicle, Sept. 26, 1768, confirmed by a contemporary broadside: "The Life and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man who was executed at Worcester, October 20, 1786, for a rape committed on the body of one Deborah Metcalfe" (Boston, 1768).]
[Footnote 11: Augusta Chronicle, Mch. 29, 1811.]