]
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.
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