It is not so profitable, however, at this day to study these early distinctions, for the distinctions based on race were then inseparably interwoven with those based on the state of slavery. Thus, it is impossible to say whether a law was passed to regulate a person’s actions because he was a slave or because he was of the Negro race. Moreover, the laws relating to race and slave distinctions prior to 1858 were compiled by John Codman Hurd in his two-volume work entitled “The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States,” published in 1858. Any attempt at a further treatment of the period covered by that work would result only in a digest of a multitude of statutes, most of which have been obsolete for many years. But a greater reason for the futility of a discussion of race distinctions before 1865 is that prior to that date, as it has been so often expressed, the Negro was considered to have no rights which the white man was bound to respect. The Dred Scott decision[3] in 1857 virtually held that a slave was not a citizen or capable of becoming one, and this dictum, unnecessary to the decision of the case, did much, says James Bryce,[4] “to precipitate the Civil War.” If the Negro could enjoy only licenses, claiming nothing as of right, it is not very valuable to study the distinctions which the master imposed upon him. The year 1865 marked the beginning of the present era in race relations. It was in that year that the Negro became a free man, and that the Federal Government undertook by successive legislative enactments to secure and guarantee to him all the rights and privileges which the Caucasian race had so long enjoyed as its inalienable heritage.