So SB1070 is on hold for the moment. As expected, the loser is appealing. Meantime the cat fighting and name calling on both sides goes on. One thing the radio talk show hosts and their callers keep repeating is that there is nothing in the bill about racial profiling. Well maybe not but it sure gives an out for those who would be inclined to do so. I’d be willing to bet a lot more people from south of Buckeye will be stopped “for reasonable cause” than Fountain Hills. But that’s something for GD to look at. The question I’m asking about pertains to slavery in the United States. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights nowhere has the word “slave” in them, yet there it was for more than eighty years after they were ratified. Can the same be said about the language that was in the slave codes of the US?
Can anyone here say what the laws regarding slavery were in the South before the Civil War? Was there any phrasing aimed towards “persons of the negro race” or something similar to keep Huck Finn from finding himself on the block alongside Jim. Was there no mention of race at all and, as with our Constitution everyone knowing who “certain persons” are, everyone knew who the slave codes applied to in reality without it being put on paper.
One of the most controversial laws involving slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, never uses the word slave or mentions race. It only uses the phrases “people held to service or labor” or “fugitives”
The Confederate Constitution also specifically referred to “negro slavery” in a couple of places, as in “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” So presumably if some Confederate state had tried to start enslaving white folks the Confederate Congress would have had the power to put the kibosh on it. That said, antebellum and Confederate-era slave state constitutions do sometimes simply refer to “slaves”, without bothering to spell out that they meant “black people”, as in the 1819 Constitution of Alabama. In other cases, as in the wording of the 1861 Georgia Constitution, it’s clear at least by implication that “negroes” and “slaves” are being used pretty much synonymously: