Seventy-two others
had from five to nine each, and 1048 had still smaller holdings.[34] The
average quota was two slaves of working age, and presumably the same number
of slave children. That is to say, the typical slaveholding family had a
single small family of slaves in its service. From available data it may be
confidently surmised, furthermore, that at least one household in every ten
among the eighty-three thousand white inhabitants of the colony held one or
more slaves. These two features--the multiplicity of slaveholdings and the
virtually uniform pettiness of their scale--constituted a regime never
paralleled in equal volume elsewhere. The economic interest in slave
property, nowhere great, was widely diffused. The petty masters, however,
maintained so little system in the management of their slaves that the
public problem of social control was relatively intense. It was a state
of affairs conducing to severe legislation, and to hysterical action in
emergencies.
[Footnote 32: _Documentary History of New York_ (Albany, 1850), I, 482.]
[Footnote 33: _Ibid_., I, 467-474.]
[Footnote 34: _Documentary History of New York_, III, 505-521.]
The first important law, enacted in 1702, repeated an earlier prohibition
against trading with slaves; authorized masters to chastise their slaves at
discretion; forbade the meeting of more than three slaves at any time or
place unless in their masters' service or by their consent; penalized with
imprisonment and lashes the striking of a "Christian" by a slave; made the
seductor or harborer of a runaway slave liable for heavy damages to the
owner; and excluded slave testimony from the courts except as against other
slaves charged with conspiracy.
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