The effect of this insurrection and this debate extended far beyond the borders of Virginia and the South. Governor McArthur of Ohio in a message to his legislature called special attention to the outbreak and the necessity for prohibitive legislation against the influx within that commonwealth of the free people of color who naturally sought an asylum in the free States. The effect in Southern States was far more significant. Many of them already had sufficient regulations to meet such emergencies as that of an insurrection but others found it necessary to revise their black codes.
Maryland passed, at the session of its legislature in 1831-1832, a law providing a board of managers to use a fund appropriated for the purpose of removing the free people of color to Liberia in connection with the State colonization society.[51] Another act forbade the introduction of slaves either for sale or resident and the immigration of free Negroes. It imposed many disabilities on the resident free people of color so as to force them to emigrate.[52] Delaware, which had by its constitution of 1831, restricted the right of franchise to whites[53] enacted in 1832 an act preventing the use of firearms by free Negroes and provided also for the enforcement of the law of 1811 against the immigration of free Negroes and mulattoes, prohibited meetings of blacks after ten o'clock and forbade non-resident blacks to preach.[54]
In 1831 Tennessee forbade free persons of color to immigrate into that State under the penalty of fine for remaining and imprisonment in default of payment. Persons emancipating slaves had to give bond for their removal to some point outside of the State[55] and additional penalties were provided for slaves found assembling or engaged in conspiracy. Georgia enacted a measure to the effect that none might give credit to free persons of color without order from their guardian required by law and, if insolvent, they might be bound out. It further provided that neither free Negroes nor slaves might preach or exhort an assembly of more than seven unless licensed by justices on certificate of three ordained ministers. They were also forbidden to carry firearms.[56] North Carolina, in which Negroes voted until 1834, enacted in 1831 a special law prohibiting free Negroes from preaching and slaves from keeping house or going at large as free men. To collect fines of free Negroes the law authorized that they might be sold.[57] The new constitution of the State in 1835 restricted the right of suffrage to white men. South Carolina passed in 1836 a law prohibiting the teaching of slaves to read and write under penalties, forbidding too the employment of a person of color as salesman in any house, store or shop used for trading. Mississippi had already met most of these requirements in the slave code in the year 1830.[58]