Citizens of Currituck County "petition your honorable bodies to take immediate steps to relieve the people of this state of the free negro population, which has always been a nuisance, and now become an element of great danger." They point out that free people of color, "scattered over the State, having at all times free communication with the slaves," do "furnish a ready and safe medium for the diffusion of incendiary doctrines which we have abundant reason to believe have, especially of late, been instilled into the minds of the slaves, and they thereby rendered insubordinate and rife for any wicked enterprise to which they may be instigated by northern Emissaries." The petitioners “firmly believing the removal of the free negroes from the State, or their reduction to the condition of the slave population, ... hold that the plain right of self defense would justify such action on their part through their Legislature.”
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Repository: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina
