It is probable that the first slave was brought into Tennessee in 1766. There are court records which show that slaves were a part of an estate in Washington County in 1788. When John Sevier moved to Nolachucky in 1788, he owned slaves. James Robertson brought a “negro fellow” to Nashville in 1779. John Donelson was accompanied by negroes on his famous voyage to Nashville in the winter of 1779-80.[13] A court record, dated November, 1788, at Jonesboro, Tennessee, shows that Andrew Jackson owned a slave when he was only twenty-one years of age.[14] On the sixth of September, 1794, a negro belonging to Peter Turner was stolen by the Indians near the Sumner Court House.[15] Miss Jane Thomas, who came with her parents to Nashville in 1804, tells an interesting story of a prominent negro, who was highly regarded by the whites.[16] There was also in Nashville in 1805, a famous “Black Bob” who ran a tavern. So it is seen that slaves accompanied the westward movement into Tennessee, and that some of them became rather prominent free negroes. In 1796, when the census of the Southwest Territory was taken to ascertain if it contained sufficient inhabitants to be admitted into the Union as a state, it had a population of 77,262, of which 10,613 were slaves.[17] The population of East Tennessee was 65,339, of which twelve and one-half per cent were slaves. The population of West Tennessee (now Middle Tennessee) was 11,824, of which twenty per cent were slaves.[18] The legal basis of slavery developed contemporary with the expansion of settlement toward the western part of the colony. The famous law of 1741 is regarded as the basis of the slave code of North Carolina, although the Act of 1715 marks the beginning of slave legislation in this colony. The laws of North Carolina were, in 1790, made the legal basis of the government of the Southwest Territory,[19] which became the State of Tennessee in 1796. These laws constitute the beginnings of the slave code of Tennessee. The common law status of the negro was, in this introductory period, gradually changed to a statutory basis. This development took, primarily, the form of granting privileges to, and placing restrictions upon, the negro. There were three political organizations that participated in this development: North Carolina, the State of Franklin, and the Southwest Territory. I. THE STATUS OF THE NEGRO IN NORTH CAROLINA FROM 1693-1790 A. PRIVILEGES—