Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Ohio passed its first comprehensive poor law in 1805. Echoing the territorial poor law, the new law established township-based boards of overseers of the poor charged with raising money for poor relief, visiting and evaluating needy persons, and determining who was entitled to relief and who had to be removed to their community of origin. The following year, the Virginia General Assembly tightened its policies on manumission and free Blacks with a new law requiring manumitted slaves to leave the state within a year of becoming free. In 1807, Ohio merged its black laws with the poor-law system. The new Ohio laws drastically increased the fee for registering and required that Black settlers get “two or more freehold sureties” of $500. The people who served as sureties—freeholders, meaning people who had unencumbered title to land—did not literally hand over $500 to the county clerk. Rather, the bonds were essentially a guarantee of Black migrants’ “good behavior” and a promise to “pay for the support” of such migrants if they were “found unable to support themselves.”