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.