Fifty residents of Sumter District seek a law prohibiting slaves from keeping dogs and making slave owners liable for "all depredations so committed on the property of Citizens of this State by such Slave or Slaves." The current statute governing the punishment of non-capital offenses by slaves -- corporal punishment as ordered by a trial before one justice of the peace and two freeholders -- is so "inadequate a barrier to the destruction of property by Negroes of an abandoned character, that in many instances the neat Cattle and other Stock of the industrious and peaceable inhabitants of this State have been shamefully destroyed."
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Repository: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina
