These two features--the multiplicity of slaveholdings and the virtually uniform pettiness of their scale--constituted a regime never paralleled in equal volume elsewhere.

The economic interest in slave property, nowhere great, was widely diffused.

The petty masters, however, maintained so little system in the management of their slaves that the public problem of social control was relatively intense.

It was a state of affairs conducing to severe legislation, and to hysterical action in emergencies.
[Footnote 32: _Documentary History of New York_ (Albany, 1850), I, 482.] [Footnote 33: _Ibid_., I, 467-474.] [Footnote 34: _Documentary History of New York_, III, 505-521.] The first important law, enacted in 1702, repeated an earlier prohibition against trading with slaves; authorized masters to chastise their slaves at discretion; forbade the meeting of more than three slaves at any time or place unless in their masters' service or by their consent; penalized with imprisonment and lashes the striking of a "Christian" by a slave; made the seductor or harborer of a runaway slave liable for heavy damages to the owner; and excluded slave testimony from the courts except as against other slaves charged with conspiracy.

In order, however, that undue loss to masters might be averted, it provided that if by theft or other trespass a slave injured any person to the extent of not more than five pounds, the slave was not to be sentenced to death as in some cases a freeman might have been under the laws of England then current, but his master was to be liable for pecuniary satisfaction and the slave was merely to be whipped.
Three years afterward a special act to check the fleeing to Canada provided a death penalty for any slave from the city and county of Albany found traveling more than forty miles north of that city, the master to be compensated from a special tax on slave property in the district.