In 1801, the Virginia Legislature passed an act requiring commissioners of the revenue to annually return a complete list of all free Black Virginians within their districts, with their names, sex, place of abode, and trades. This collection includes those lists as well as “Free Negro Tax Lists”; and “Free Negro Delinquent Tax Lists.”
For many years in Virginia, each adult male was required to pay a flat tax ranging somewhere between 30 to 65 cents to fund county government operation. However, in the 1810s, Virginia imposed a “specific tax” exclusively on free Black individuals. The tax rate varied throughout the years leading up to the Civil War, but for the most part hovered around $1. Many Black individuals already struggled to pay the county levy, and Virginia legislators intended that an additional tax would further restrict autonomy. Several laws passed in 1782, 1814, and 1820 allowed sheriffs to hire out Black tax delinquents (those who did not pay their levy). Delinquent tax lists include names of free Black individuals returned delinquent and sometimes why they were returned, such as "no property," "removed," or "not found.” In addition to representing blatant taxation without representation, these hiring-out scenarios were largely exploitative.
Tax collection and hiring out tax delinquents was not strictly enforced and varied from each locality. For a time in the late 1830s and early 1840s, taxes were not even collected. By the 1850s, however, Virginia found a way to use the money collected from free Black residents to fund their removal from the state. In 1853, the General Assembly passed a law allowing the taxes raised on free Black men and women to be collected in a fund to be applied to the removal of these individuals as a part of the recolonization effort. See Colonization Records for more.
Descriptions included in this dataset are drawn directly from the original documents and may contain language which is now deemed offensive.
