Sixty inhabitants of Loudoun and Fauquier counties seek a law to regulate owners and drivers of market carts and wagons. They represent that "a species of Traffic is daily carried on between the county in which they live and the neighboring cities of the District of Columbia which loudly calls for legal restraint." They purport that said traffick "consists in the purchase by persons of bad character from slaves and receivers of stolen property, usually free negroes and mulattoes, but not infrequently a depraved class of white persons without any visible means of subsistence except in this particular trade, of various sorts of live and dead provisions which are borne to the market above mentioned, in covered carts and eight waggons and there disposed of." They therefore "respectfully suggest the expediency of denying altogether to free negroes & mulattoes to slaves not specially authorised by their owners or masters & to all persons of notoriously bad character the right to carry on this species of traffic and the regulation of it to that effect by proper & guarded licensers."
Result: Bill reported.
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Repository: Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia
