They were taxable property valued according to the length of service.

Negroes served as laborers on farms, house servants, and in salt mines, the latter being an excuse for holding them as slaves.

Persons of color could purchase servants of their own race.

The law provided that the Justice of the County could on complaint from the master order that a lazy servant be whipped.

In this frontier section, therefore, where men often took the law in their own hands, slaves were often punished and abused just as they were in the Southern States.