in any grog shop, grocery or other place where spirituous liquors
are retailed in said town, or who may be found on the streets of
said town after ten o'clock at night, unless it shall appear to
the said Town Sergeant, or assistant, that said negro slave or
slaves, are acting under the orders of his, her or their master
or mistress, and it shall further be the duty of the Town
Sergeant, or either of his assistants, to enter into any grog
shop, grocery or other place where spirituous liquors are
retailed, in said town, whenever he shall be informed that any
negro slave or slaves are collected therein. Provided, said Town
Sergeant, or assistant, can enter the same peaceably and without
force.[307]

This town regulation offers perhaps another proof of the oft-repeated
statement regarding the slave laws of Kentucky that while they
appeared severe on the statute books they were always mild in the
enforcement. The regulation of the movement of slaves in the towns was
always subject to the local conditions. Beginning about 1850 there was
a growing feeling in some of the more thickly populated sections of
the State that the type of Negro slave who sought to frequent the
village saloons would sooner or later start an insurrection. But no
such uprising ever occurred and the fear of such seems to have been
due to the current animosity towards the activities of the
abolitionists, which was prevalent throughout the State.

In the course of time it was considered necessary to treat more
seriously also the importation of slaves. The advisability of
preventing the importation of bondmen had been foreseen in Kentucky
from the experience of the mother State of Virginia which had enacted
a stringent law in 1778 imposing a penalty of one thousand pounds and
the forfeiture of the slave upon the importer of any into that
commonwealth. The ninth article of the Kentucky Constitution of 1792
had provided that the legislature "shall have full power to prevent
slaves being brought into this commonwealth as merchandise; they shall
have full power to prevent any slave being brought into this state
from a foreign country, and to prevent those from being brought into
this state, who have been since the first of January, 1789, or may
hereafter be imported into any of the United States from a foreign
country."[308]

The session of the State assembly in 1794 drew up a law concerning the
impor