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Slave Codes

Because slavery was a local institution, the law that supported it displayed great variety. Every slave state had a slave code, and that code (a body of statutes defining the institution) spelled out the property rights of masters to their slaves, the duties owed by slaves to masters, the safeguards available to the community to protect against slave rebellions, and the treatment that masters could exercise over their slaves. The codes were monuments to the idea that law could mold human behavior, order society, and fix personal status.

The codes shared certain basic assumptions and they had considerable continuity with their colonial counterparts. By the end of the eighteenth century, for example, slaves were generally treated in state codes and in court decisions as personal rather than real property. Because they were "chattels personal," slaves could be bought, sold, leased, used as collateral, bequeathed to subsequent generations, and even freed. In its crudest form, the slave law of the antebellum South simply categorized black human beings as property assets.

As in the colonial era, slave status was perpetual and inherited through the mother. This second condition was unique, because under English common law the status of children depended on the father. Slave codes expressed the truth of southern sexual practices: white men invariably engaged in sexual relations with black slave women. To have extended freedom to the progeny of these relations would have been a tacit acceptance of slave humanity and race mixing, a practice that troubled southerners almost as much as the threat of slave insurrections. Jefferson, for example (who many historians believe had his own black paramour), refused to free his slaves, insisting that freed slaves had "to be removed beyond the reach of mixture" lest they "stai[n] the blood of [the] master." 4

The codes commanded absolute obedience by slave to master. "The condition of the slave being a merely passive one," the Louisiana Slave Code of 1806 proclaimed, "his subordination to his master and to all who represent him is not susceptible of modification or restriction. [H]e owes to his master . . . a respect without bounds." 5 Many southern appellate judges embraced this absolute view of slavery. Judge Thomas Ruffin, of North Carolina, explained in State v. Mann ( 1829) that under the law of slavery "the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect." 6 A master was free to do as he wished, short of murdering his slave. He was restrained only by common sense, community approval, and any laws passed by the legislature. Ruffin worried about the corrosive effect of slave law on the general morality of the South, believing that absolute subjugation of the slave "constitutes the curse of slavery to both the bond and the free portion of our population." But he grimly concluded that "it is inherent in the relation of master to servant." 7



Beginning in the early 1830s, the severity of the codes increased as slavery matured into a system of race as well as labor control. By 1820 the number of slaves had doubled from 1790, and the problem of managing them grew apace. In addition, slaves themselves worked within the institution to find forms of resistance, ranging from simple malingering to outright rebellion. The latter was suicidal, but enough incidents occurred to force whites to seek greater security. When Nat Turner, a slave preacher, led a band of armed followers in 1831 on a bloody rampage through Virginia's Southampton County

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(killing sixty men, women, and children), terrified whites retaliated, first by slaughtering at least 100 blacks and then by writing into the Virginia Slave Code harsh penalties for slaves who rebelled and whites who encouraged such behavior. The Virginia Code of 1849, for example, provided fine and imprisonment for any person who maintained "that owners have no right of property in their slaves." 8 "If a free person," the Alabama Code stated, "advise or conspire with a slave to . . . make insurrection, . . . he shall be punished with death, whether such rebellion or insurrection be made or not."9

Despite the emphasis in the law on the slave as property, white southerners understood perfectly well that slaves were human beings capable of perpetrating criminal acts. They had volition, will, and personality, all of which the law had to mute. Southern slave and criminal codes enforced slavery as it was, and southern lawmakers seldom worried about the theoretical coherence of the law they fashioned. They uniformly dealt more severely with slaves and free blacks than with whites. Certain felonies committed by blacks, free or slave, were otherwise treated as misdemeanors if perpetrated by whites. At a time when penal reformers were reducing the incidence of capital punishment, southern states broadened the scope of the death penalty for slaves guilty of murder in any degree, poisoning, robbery, rape or attempted rape of a white woman, rebellion, and arson. Furthermore, incorrigible slaves were singled out. In Louisiana, for example, a slave convicted three times of striking a white person was to suffer death.

What was on the books, both in punishments and protections for slaves, often differed from behavior. J. D. B. De Bow, a prominent southern publisher and writer, thought that the real law of slavery was on the plantation. "On our estates," he wrote, "we dispense with the whole machinery of public policy and public courts of justice. Thus we try, decide, and execute the sentences in thousands of cases, which in other countries would go into the courts."10 Before the Civil War the law of slavery and race relations in the South was generally "indwelling." "The southern consensus on race," Daniel Boorstin writes, "was so pervasive and constraining" that the law merely ratified rather than channeled attitudes about slaves and free blacks. 11

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 833


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