What is the significance of slave codes

In sum, the law denied black workers freedom of choice in employment. A free man or woman did not have the agency to refuse to work for an employer that mistreated them. The laws produced a vicious cycle; when blacks did not have a job, they were then convicted as vagrants and forced to work without pay.

The black codes of South Carolina also forced black children into apprenticeship under the guise of teaching them a trade. The legislature created separate courts to try blacks for crimes and meted out the death penalty for theft. Black Americans, though free, could not engage in commerce as other residents of South Carolina. The rest of the states followed by passing laws that made the condition of freedom in the South closely resemble the old system of slavery.

The social custom at the time required blacks to recognize that whites had power over them, just as they did under slavery. Although the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, Congress quickly recognized that little else had changed in southern culture. From the Report on the Condition of the South by Carl Schurz and the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction submitted by representatives and senators, radical Republicans in Congress could clearly see that something else needed to be done to bring about lasting reform in the South.

The United States needed to secure the civil rights of black Americans, Schurz and congressional investigators asserted. Congress then inaugurated a radical plan of reconstruction.

It passed a series of Reconstruction Acts starting in , which denied the vote to disloyal whites and enfranchised loyal black and white union men; it divided southern states into military districts under the command of military governors, with authority to convene constitutional conventions to write new state constitutions.

It called for new elections based on male suffrage and ushered in a period whereby black men could walk the halls of Congress and state legislatures for the first time in the history of the country. It recognized that citizens had privileges and immunities and denied states the ability to take the life or liberty of any citizen or deny them the equal protection of the laws. The slave codes of the 17th — 19th centuries , the black laws of the early 19th century , and the black codes after the Civil War had one thing in common: they limited the social, economic, and political rights of black Americans.

The slave codes enslaved Africans forcibly removed from their homeland and made them the primary labor source in the colonies and the United States. Once freed, the black laws of the North did not recognize black Americans as equal to whites; thus, these laws denied black Americans the vote, jury service, testimony against whites in court, and a plethora of other civil and economic rights. The black codes of the South not only mirrored these laws but went further by robbing the free of the freedom the Thirteenth Amendment conferred.

Indeed, the amendment granted enslaved blacks their physical freedom; however, the black codes negated it and reduced black Americans to virtual slaves under various acts southern legislatures passed to maintain white supremacy.

Due to a counterrevolution launched by Congress starting with the Thirteenth Amendment, the United States of America and a national commitment to equality under the law eventually trumped all stratagems of southern legislatures and courts that hindered the full expression of the vision of the revolutionary generation from becoming a reality.

There are a few mandatory sources to understand the development of slavery in British America. The English colonists had an economic imperative for cheap laborers, and they did not care about the color of their skin. Once it became clear from experience that there were reasons why Africans offered a better financial investment, racism based on color became entrenched in the colonies, even though there are many arguments that people rank sameness in their culture higher than differences.

Europeans might have had a preference for white laborers but chose blacks because they could get away with exploiting them. William M. In addition, Timothy H. Judge Higginbotham provides essential details about Jenny Slew, Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and others involved in the legal battle for freedom.

The English influence is also significant when evaluating natural rights and American courts. Stewart influenced the American judicial system to lean toward freedom. Both books address tensions between slavery and freedom in the old northwest; Middleton goes on to show how such pressures pervaded the free states in the 19th century , namely the black laws. From these sources, written by eyewitnesses, readers will be compelled to recognize the urgency felt by Radical Republicans that something needed to be done to bring the nation together and secure the gains of the Civil War.

Robert J. In many ways he explains that Congress rewrote the United States Constitution with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which not only altered the old theory of federalism but also empowered the nation to impose federal protection of civil rights. Technology the Internet makes it easier for researchers to uncover the rise of slavery, including the international slave trade.

Hening is the most definitive source of colonial statutes on American slavery. Early English Books Online is a searchable database that allows researchers to gain an understanding about how whites thought about slavery as well as its expansion. The American Revolution altered the trajectory of slavery on the British mainland in a significant way.

Once freed from slavery African Americans faced laws to subjugate them. Original sources that illustrate why Congress felt compelled to reform the South with stringent measures can be found in the Report on the Condition of the South by Carl Schurz and the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Quinn, ed. Winthrop D.

William B. Philip Schaff et al. Timothy H. William W. New York: R. Bartow, , ; and Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color , Hening, Statutes at Large , Also see James D. Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham, Jr. Schaff, American Church History , Kathleen M. Sally E. Douglas R. New York: W. Martin Jr. Goodell, American Slave Code , 25— Blacks before the law in Colonial Maryland ; Ross M. Blacks before the law in Colonial Maryland.

Hening, Statutes at Large , 4: Jeffrey K. Junius P. Knopf, , chap. David J. McCord, ed. Acts of the South Carolina General Assembly, Johnston, , Karen B.

Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color , Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color , 86—87, 91— Carl H. Love, George C. Mendenhall, C. Donald E. Williams Jr. Timothy S. New York: Macmillan, , 1: —; Daniel A. Pete Daniel, Daniel A. Supreme Court. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.

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Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Search within The act also levied a penalty if the ratio of unfree laborers to overseers exceeded six to one. Slaves still found the means to move about with a level of freedom that many planters found disconcerting. And while the codes sanctioned and enforced the awesome power that planters as a class wielded over the slave population, individual slaves and slaveowners nevertheless negotiated for power on a daily basis on the plantations and elsewhere.

The Stono Rebellion in resulted in a more rigid slave code that would remain the basis for South Carolina slavery until its end in , and which would influence slave codes throughout the South.

They could not testify under oath, and the testimonies of whites continued to trump those of slaves. The murder of a slave by a white person was reduced to a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine.

Penalties for slave crimes increased: execution was sanctioned for plotting rebellion or running away , committing arson, or instructing other slaves in the use of poisonous plants.

Any white person, not just slaveowners, was given the authority to arrest and punish blacks found in violation of the law. Almost every aspect of slave life came under tightened legal scrutiny. For the same reason, unions or marriages between whites and blacks, when not expressly forbidden, were seen as a contamination, a sort of perversion of the natural order of things [ 75 ].

The provisions concerning the physical protection of whites were often accompanied by precepts that tended to discourage or prohibit manifestations of the slave culture. Religious rites, dances and African customs were considered dangerous in the Codes, because they could upset white people and be a bond between the ranks of slaves present in the colonies.

The subjugated could not have their own culture because it constituted a manifestation of human nature and the slaves were not considered men.

Their role was to work, to serve the master and to submissively follow his orders. He existed in function of his master and for nothing else. These were the key concepts that were laid down in all the major slave codes issued in the overseas colonies during the seventeenth century. These legal precepts were considered as the substratum necessary to ensure the functioning of an exploitation colony. Whatever was the size of its slave population, a slave society had to have laws that specifically dealt with slavery.

This may help to understand why the instrument of the slave code was adopted even in small realities and by states that played a very marginal role in the process of colonization of the Americas. Denmark, for example, after taking possession of the Virgin Islands between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth , adopted the so-called Gardelin Code in its colonies. The legal text, named after its editor—Philip Gardelin, governor of the island of Saint-Thomas—was one of the most rigid slave codes in the European colonial panorama [ 76 ].

With its adoption, the Danish administrators hoped to keep under control the huge mass of slaves employed in the sugarcane plantations born in their domains.

However, as the slave revolt on Saint-John demonstrated, deprivation and oppression were not always a valid solution to the problems of public order within the colonies. Like the Danish one, the Swedish text was thus named because of its editor, Pehr Herman Von Rosenstein, governor of the island from to [ 76 ].

It was a code inspired by French slave legislation, in particular by an ordinance on the treatment of slaves issued in Martinique in The legislative body was a kind of summary in which the tradition of European Slave laws was collected.

In the norms established by Rosenstein, the African slaves were considered as treacherous and evil, not deserving to be considered human. They were not allowed to gather, to profess their beliefs, or even to ride a horse. The normative text configured itself as an instrument for the control of the entire black population: in fact, numerous articles were dedicated exclusively to the regulation of the life of the freed slaves. It was in this regard that we noted the only real innovation of the von Rosenstein Code compared to the French legislation to which, as we said, it is inspired.

The political and economic reasons that led to the creation of the slave codes are very clear. They were considered necessary to maintain public order in the colonies, avoiding the outbreak of riots and thus allowing the slave exploitation system to function more efficiently.

In order to achieve these objectives, the codes could provide both strictly punitive rules, designed to create terror in the slave labor force, and paternalistic rules, designed to make the bitter life of the slave more bearable. In fact, very few masters were tried for breaking the rules laid down in the codes: the mistreatment and abuse committed against slaves remained a constant and the authorities did not show a marked perseverance in prosecuting these crimes.

This indicates that, apart from formal recognition, the rights granted to slaves, except in rare cases, remained a political expedient rather than a reality.

The aforementioned helps to understand why in the colonial daily life many of the prescriptions contained in the codes remained substantially inapplicable. The ruling class often judged the norms of the codes to be too permissive and paternalistic: they appreciated their punitive and persecutory measures, circumventing most of the laws that attempted to limit their sovereignty.

Analyzing all these elements, it seems evident that the impact of slave codification on the administration of slave workforce was relatively marginal: the will of the master remained the only true law to which slaves should have obeyed.

But the codes were not only a political instrument but also a cultural product of the slave society and are important because by studying them it is possible to analyze the characteristics of the discriminatory and segregationist system constituted in the European colonies of exploitation. One of the fundamental tasks of the codes was to try to eternalize the existing slave system, not only from an administrative and legal point of view but also from a cultural and moral point of view.

It was above all in this latter perspective that the impact of the codes was significant: not only did the slave codes try to discipline the many aspects of the life of the slaves in the colonies but also contributed to further dehumanizing the African workforce. Slaves had no human dignity according to the law and therefore, in the eyes of the landowner class—who was already not very disposed to tolerate external intrusions—they did not deserve to be safeguarded.

While the application of the codes was therefore sporadic and arbitrary, much more important was the cultural impact that the slavery laws had on the societies in which they were adopted. This impact conditioned the perception of the slave institution and became the foundation of the European exploitation colonies. The idea of slave as a factor of production, as an object, is deeply rooted in all the societies that adopted slave legislation.

That is why the idea of the slave and the African slave in particular as an inferior human being resisted even after slavery was abolished. From this point of view, the slave legislation has certainly achieved one of the objectives it aimed to pursue: the perpetuation of the economic and cultural patterns that lie behind the slave system. Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.

Help us write another book on this subject and reach those readers. Login to your personal dashboard for more detailed statistics on your publications. Edited by Jane Reeves. Edited by Rosalba Morese. We are IntechOpen, the world's leading publisher of Open Access books. Built by scientists, for scientists. Our readership spans scientists, professors, researchers, librarians, and students, as well as business professionals. Downloaded: Abstract The paper proposed aims to analyze the slavery legislation born between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the so-called Black Codes laws—enacted in all the greatest colonial powers of the Old Continent—which regulated life and transportation of slaves in the colonies.

Keywords overseas empires Atlantic slavery slave laws colonization process America Caribbean. Introduction Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, many European states tried to build their own overseas empire. More Print chapter. How to cite and reference Link to this chapter Copy to clipboard. Available from:. Over 21, IntechOpen readers like this topic Help us write another book on this subject and reach those readers Suggest a book topic Books open for submissions.

More statistics for editors and authors Login to your personal dashboard for more detailed statistics on your publications. Access personal reporting. Du Bois, W. New York: Routledge Press, Instead, Du Bois highlights black political activism and agency and argues that Reconstruction was a time of expanded democracy. One of the first monographs to examine the black codes and their impact on postbellum black life.

Foner, Eric. New York: Harper Collins, This magisterial work provides a sweeping overview of the Reconstruction period, beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation and ending with the Compromise of Foner, like Du Bois, emphasizes how African Americans made social, political, and economic advances during Reconstruction despite white Southern backlash.

An essential book for understanding the milieu in which white Southern legislators created the black codes. Genovese, Eugene D. New York: Vintage Books, Applying a Marxist interpretation to the study of slavery, Genovese argues that the system of slavery was based on the idea of paternalism: a system of reciprocal duties, obligations, and responsibilities between the enslaved and enslaver.

This work uses plantation records, slave narratives, and court cases to demonstrate that the enslaved carried out subtle forms of resistance to combat the restriction of slave codes. Hadden, Sally E. This work is the only full-length monograph on the origins of slave patrols and how they functioned in the US South.

Hadden details how these police units maintained order and enforced slave codes on plantations in Virginia and North and South Carolina. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery: — New York: Hill and Wang, Kolchin provides a comprehensive look at the development of US slavery from the 17th century through the end of Reconstruction in Covers a variety of topics, including enslaved family life, proslavery ideology, and abolitionist rhetoric.