Another common form of legislation with regard to free Negroes was that relative to their contracts for personal service. A Florida[100] statute of 1865 required that all contracts with persons of color should be in writing and fully explained to them before two credible witnesses, and that one copy of the contract should be kept by the employer and the other by some judicial officer of the State and county wherein the service was to be performed. Contracts for less than thirty days might be oral. The Negro who failed to perform his contract by wilful disobedience of orders, wanton impudence, or disrespect, failure or refusal to do the work assigned to him, idleness, or abandonment of the premises, was treated as a vagrant. In 1866[101] the law ceased to be a race distinction when, by a new enactment, it was greatly limited and made applicable to whites and blacks alike.
The law of Kentucky[102] required contracts between white persons and Negroes to be in writing and attested by some white person. The contracts were to be treated as entire, so that, if either party should, without good cause, abandon the contract, the other should be held to have performed his obligation.
Mississippi[103] enacted that all contracts for labor with freedmen, free Negroes, or mulattoes for a longer period than one month should be in writing, attested by two disinterested white persons in the county where the labor was to be performed, and read to the Negro by some officer. If the laborer quit without good cause before the expiration of the term, he forfeited his wages for the year up to the time of quitting. That State made it the duty of every civil officer and the option of every other person to arrest and carry back to his employer every Negro laborer who had left, and the person making the arrest was entitled to receive five dollars as a fee and ten cents per mile from the place of arrest to the place of delivery, the same to be paid by the employer and taken out of the wages of the Negro. The Negro might appeal to a justice of the peace who might summarily try the merits of the case. Then, either the master or the servant might appeal to the county court which had power to remand the deserter to the employer or to dispose of him otherwise as it thought right and just, and its decision was final.