In all the colonies thus grouped together, the system of slavery had already become well established, and with its institution the question of the escape and return of the slaves had necessarily arisen. The conditions of the country, both physical and social, gave unusual facilities for flight. The wild woods, the Indian settlements, or the next colony, peopled by a foreign race, and perhaps as yet without firmly established government, offered to the slave a refuge and possibly protection. Escape, therefore, as a peculiar danger, demanded peculiar remedies. Though it is the purpose of this monograph not so much to study the detail of legislation or escape in the colonies as to deal with the period from 1789 to 1865, a slight sketch of the intercolonial laws and provisions which preceded and in part suggested later legislation will first be necessary.
Almost immediately after the introduction of slavery, in 1619, we begin to find regulations made by the colonists upon this subject. At first they applied solely to their own territory, but soon agreements were entered into among several colonies, or between a colony and the Indians or the French in Canada. These acts and agreements recognized not only the negro, as at a later period, but also the white and the Indian slave. There existed in some of the colonies of this time a peculiar class of white people, who received no wages, and were bound to their masters.[1] Usually these redemptioners were laborers or handicraftsmen, but sometimes they were persons of education who had committed a crime, and were sold according to law for a term of years, or for life. One of the class is curiously connected with the education of no less a person than George Washington. An unpublished autobiography of the Reverend John Boucher, who from 1760 to the Revolution was a teacher and preacher in Virginia, contains the following paragraph noticing the fact:--
"Mr. Washington was the second of five sons, of parents distinguished neither for their rank nor fortune.... George, who, like most people thereabouts at that time, had no other education than reading, writing, and accounts, which he was taught by a convict servant whom his father bought for a schoolmaster, first set out in the world as a surveyor of Orange County."[2]