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A special act of 1668, indeed, gave sharp assertion to the policy of using taxation as a token of race distinction: "Whereas some doubts have arisen whether negro women set free were still to be accompted tithable according to a former act, it is declared by this grand assembly that negro women, though permitted to enjoy their freedome yet ought not in all respects to be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the English, and are still liable to the payment of taxes."
Land at twenty shillings per hundred acres was offered to each emigrant settling within the territory and raising a crop of corn before September 1, 1775, the emigrant being permitted to take up as much as five hundred acres for him self and two hundred and fifty acres for each tithable person under him.
Confirmation of the movement towards the frontier is shown in the report to the same Assembly by the sheriffs of Isle of Wight County and Elizabeth City County, both at the mouth of the James River, that their counties were overrated in the tax lists of "tithable" persons by thirty-eight and thirty-two persons respectively.
In the same year it was provided that free Negroes and mulattoes might be employed as drummers or trumpeters in servile labor, but that they were not to bear arms; and all free Negroes above sixteen years of age were declared tithable.
Massachusetts in 1712 prohibited such importation, as the Indians were "malicious, surly, and very ungovernable," and she was followed to similar effect by Pennsylvania in 1712, by New Hampshire in 1714, and by Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1715. The law of 1645 provided for a tax on property and tithable persons.
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