12/17/1859
Georgia passed the latest in a recent set of laws designed to protect the institution of slavery with a statute that enable the sale at slave auction of any free black indicted for vagrancy. Earlier the state had banned masters freeing slaves in their will and enacted a measure to ban free blacks from entering the state. Under the law, a vagrant was "any free person of color wandering or strolling about, or leading an idle, immoral or profligate course of life..." (By John Osborne)
Source Citation:
Charles M. Christian, Sari Bennett, Black Saga: the African American Experience : a Chronology (New York: Civitas Press, 1999), 169.
John Codman Hurd, The Laws of Freedom and Bondage in the United States, Volume II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1862), 109.