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Chapter 02
Codifying Slavery

A manuscript document, one sheet of handwritten script in black ink on white paper, written by Col. Henry Ward Adams of the Virginia Militia and addressed to Capt. William C. Grasty. The document reads [I, having been requested to / appoint a company of patrol and believing the same / to be very necessary, do (in pursuance of an act of / Assembly in that case made and provided) hereby appo- / -int William C Grasty pr Captain, and Edmund / Fitzgerald, N. C. Miller, Coleman Scruggs, Morton Scruggs, / James M. Fitzgerald, John Rice Miller, Charles E. Miller, / and Luther E. Tynes a company of Patrol within the / 2nd Battalion of the 168th Regiment of Virginia Militia in / the muster bounds of Capt Wm C Grasty to patrol / and visit all Negro quarters and other places suspect- / -ed of entertaining unlawful assemblies of slaves, / servants or other disorderly persons as aforesaid, unl- / -awfully assembled, or any others strolling from one plantation to another, without a pass from his or / her master or mistress or overseer, and take them / before the next justice of the peace, who if he shall / see cause, is hereby required to order every such / slave servant stroller or other disorderly person as / aforesaid to receive any number of lashes, not exc- / -eeding twenty on his or her bare back.]. On the reverse of the document is written [Capt. William C. Grasty / Mount Airy / Henry Adams / 15 March 1846].

Slavery Defines the Nation

When a person held to service or labor . . . shall hereafter escape . . . the person or persons to whom such service or labor may be due . . . may pursue and reclaim such fugitive person.

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

The Fugitive Slave Bill . . . commenced its bloody crusade o’er the land, and . . . imperatively demands an expression, whether we will tamely submit to chains and slavery, or whether we will . . . Live and Die freemen.

Rally of Colored Citizens, 1850

[The] meaning of this act [is] not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State . . . but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.

Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

I see husbands and wives, parents and children, separated, manacled and driven off. . . . I see . . . the ferocious bloodhounds dyed in red gore and the . . . victims’ whitened bones . . . on the plains of Kansas.

William J. Wilson, 1854

A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen' . . . they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, majority opinion for Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, 1857

Dred Scott is born in Virginia

1795

Dred Scott taken to Alabama cotton plantation

1818

Taken to Missouri and sold to Dr. John Emerson

1830

Taken to Fort Armstrong, Illinois, a free state

1833

Taken to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, in the free Territory of Wisconsin

1836

Taken to Fort Jesup, Louisiana, a slave state

1838

Taken to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, a free territory

1838

Taken to Missouri, a slave state

1842

Sues for freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court

1846

Case dismissed on a technicality

1847

Scott sues for freedom in U.S. Federal Court and loses

1853

Scott appeals case to Supreme Court

1856

Your national ship is rotten sinking, why not leave it, and why not say so boldly, manfully? . . . Leave that slavery-cursed republic.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 1857