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Free Negro Legislation in Missouri |
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Debow's Review May 1859 |
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| The first marked and direct raving of the free soil sentiment, in Missouri, was compassed in the Lower House of the State Legislature on Wednesday last. The Democracy and the slaveholders have met the rising feeling, and encountered it with open hostility. A bill in regard to free Negroes was passed, which provides that no slave shall be deemed emancipated till his master shall have entered into bonds in the sum of two thousand dollars, to remove the Negro from the State within ninety days after the act of emancipation, and if any Negro who may thus have been transported from the State shall return, he shall be reduced to slavery. All free Negroes who may be residents of the State in eighteen hundred and sixty are declared to be slaves, and the sheriff is authorized to sell them under the provisions of the act. The clause is made applicable only to those persons who may have come into the State subsequent to the sixteenth of February, eighteen hundred and forty-seven, and their descendants. All free Negroes over the age of eighteen are to be notified, on or before the first Monday of August next, of the existence of this act, by the sheriff of the different counties, and twelve months is allowed in which to leave the State. Provision is made by which a free Negro over twenty-one years of age may select a master or mistress in the State, after which he is to be regarded as a slave. |