December 1800

In the wake of Gabriel's Rebellion (1800) and ongoing news from Haiti, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia tightened their slave codes substantially. Virginia banned all meetings of enslaved people after sunset, prohibited free Black people from owning weapons, and restricted hiring-out and self-hiring of enslaved workers. South Carolina required any free Black person arriving from the Caribbean to leave immediately on pain of re-enslavement. Georgia and Virginia both restricted manumission. These legislative responses collectively reduced the already-narrow freedoms of both enslaved and free Black populations and hardened the legal architecture of racial slavery.