In 1860 there
were 83,942 of this class in Maryland, 58,042 in Virginia, 30,463 in North
Carolina, 18,467 in Louisiana, and 250,787 in the South at large.
[Footnote 66: Alexandria, Va., _Advertiser_, Feb. 22, 1798, notice of the
society's quarterly meeting; J.D. Paxton, _Letters on Slavery_ (Lexington,
Ky., 1833), p. 30, note.]
A few free negroes were reduced by public authority to private servitude,
whether for terms or for life, in punishment for crime. In Maryland under
an act of 1858 eighty-nine were sold by the state in the following two
years, four of them for life and the rest for terms, after convictions
ranging from arson to petty larceny.[67] Some others were sold in various
states under laws applying to negro vagrancy, illegal residence, or even to
default of jail fees during imprisonment as fugitive suspects.
[Footnote 67: J.R. Brackett, _The Negro in Maryland_, pp. 231, 232.]
A few others voluntarily converted themselves into slaves. Thus Lucinda who
had been manumitted under a will requiring her removal to another state
petitioned the Virginia legislature in 1815 for permission, which was
doubtless granted, to become the slave of the master of her slave husband
"from whom the benefits and privileges of freedom, dear and flattering
as they are, could not induce her to be separated.
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