While this varied by state, it was generally illegal to murder a slave. For example, a Mississippi case upheld a verdict of murder against a slaveowner and his companion who killed a slave while drunk. Kelly v. State, 11 Miss. 518 (1844).
Cases of this kind are not common, and I think it fair to say that slaves would have faced many obstacles in obtaining legal protection.
Firstly, from that and it’s twin German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, those may be the figures, but equally it may have been 1.1. million deaths from 2.8 million. Which would be about 40% at a guess. Plus the nazi camps and cruelties were in wartime — the communists continued the same deathfilled brutal camps in peace, both before and after. The Gulag horizon was not bound by time.
And the soviet POW deaths you give are inflated by the nazis’ most atrocious crime: the mass starvation of prisoners in the year following Barbarossa, when they had captured more than they could swallow.
The odd thing is that not concentrated in a work camp, a large number of constructions in that period each claimed the lives of a moderate and locally ignorable fatalities, that* in toto* add up to a surprising amount. Particularly when simply because they were construction works, most of these deaths would be avoidably with more care and less haste. The fact that frequently throughout history constructions entailed no automatic deaths shows that it was possible to do it without a butcher’s bill.
The first 3 years building The West Highland Railway there were no deaths — so it was possible — from 1890 to 1894 37 men died out of 5000. You may say that’s an unimportant amount, compared with the totalitarian efforts; but — apart from Kipling’s dictum that a death in an obscure mountain pass is as important to the person dying as a death at Waterloo — but that was just one project out of many thousands.
And it wasn’t confined to Britain, men died building the American rails and building the Panama Canal. ( The latter presumably through mostly disease: but no-one offers that as a pass for deaths in nazi camps. ) On the Canadian Pacific Railway, Chinese navvies died at the rate of 4 to a mile. ( pdf )
As for being slaves, the quality of life for the 19th century working class was only fractionally above impoverished serfdom.
Still, are there any cases of slave-owners swinging for killing a slave, or even killing someone else’s slave ?
Well, that was the point. They just put prisoners in open-air cages to starve; the Russians put Germans to forced labour. No Nazis were losing sleep over the lack of any facilities or how they were letting sources of labour drop dead without even attempting to put them to work. It was not an accident of war, it was deliberate murder. See also Speer’s cross examination at Nuremberg which makes it clear that getting work out of prisoners was a secondary priority to starving them to death;
Sohling, Office Chief, Locomotive Construction Works: "…sick people are a dead weight to us and not a help to production. To this remark Herr Prior stated that if one was no good, then another was; that the Bolsheviks were a soulless people; and if 100000 of them died, another 100000 would replace them. On my remarking that with such a coming and going we would not attain our goal…Herr Prior said, ‘Deliveries are only of secondary importance here.’ "
Speer: “…At that time there were official instructions that the Russian workers who came to the Reich should be treated worse than the western prisoners of war and the western workers. I learned of this through complaints from the heads of concerns. …I called Hitler’s attention to the fact that the feeding both of Russian prisoners of war and of Russian workers was absolutely insufficient and that they would have to be given an adequate diet”
ETA; Perhaps we should stop the hijack or take it to a new thread; in any case I don’t disagree that gulags were shitty places too (I’ve read The Gulag Archipelago too), but rather that Nazi and Soviet ideology viewed their prisoners respectively as vermin or workhorses.
I agree regarding the hijack, but would just say I consider Speer — repentant in adversity and fuhrer-to-be had they won — one of the most contemptible of beings and his self-serving confessions geared to his own fame as suspect simply because they came from him.
Why are people giving so many replies about Nazi and Soviet prisoners to a question about American slavery and the legalities involved in their treatment?
My bad; was replying to slowlearner who posited the Nazis were more enlightened than southern slave owners, but the systems were completely different. In the south, slaves were seen as property with worth, in das Grossdeutsches Reich slaves were seen as subhumans who should all die.
I don’t know if there were any cases of capital punishment for killing a slave, but I don’t think that’s a reasonable test. After all, most murderers today are not executed.
But my point is (1) slaves did have significant legal protections, at least when it came to murder, but (2) in practice, vindication of those rights was doubtful at best. I am reminded of a story Mark Twain told, of a slaveowner who seriously injured one of his slaves. According to Twain, people looked down on him for doing this, but didn’t say anything to him because it was his right to do with his property as he wished. There doesn’t seem to have been any awareness that the slaveowner had committed a criminal act. And if people don’t know about the law, it won’t be enforced.
I think it is a reasonable test given the number of murders and thieves who were hung back then. And yes, there were cases: see post 20. Then set it in context with this chart of US executions in 1775. U.S. Executions - 1775 - DeathPenaltyUSA, the database of executions in the United States
It would be reasonable to ask if slaveowners were executed for murdering slaves, if the question were whether slaves were entitled to the same protections as whites. However, the question was whether slaves had at least some protection against bloodthirsty masters. And the answer is that they did have at least some protection, and whites occasionally were punished for killing slaves, although that punishment was infrequent and was in practice less severe than would have applied to the murder of a white.
I would ever prefer a good public shunning to dancing on the air as a punishment; but then, I’m an introvert.
I was under the impression that slaves were expensive. Am I wrong?
They generally were, but that doesn’t mean murder never happened. People destroy valuable things in a rage all the time. People murder their own children. Furthermore, slaves are only valuable if they can be compelled to work for you and if you are reasonably confident that they won’t murder you in your bed. Violence, pain, and fear were used to insure these two things, and if that sometimes resulted in the death of one valuable piece of capital, it had to be contextualized as part of keeping everyone else in line and productive.
It varied over time, particularly once the importation of slaves ended. Here is a graph of the average price of a slave in in the US in 2011 dollars. The earlier prices were high enough you would not do it casually, but not incredibly high. Towards the end of slavery you would be throwing away a lot of money if you did so.
Of course, an old man and a healthy 19-year-old would have vastly different values.
And here is a comparison of that. 100 is the value of a healthy 18-30 year old man in Louisiana in 1850. The Old South refers to the Atlantic coast states. One could expect the relative values to remain similar as the overall price rises or falls.
So, combining the two with a bit of estimation, it seems one would pay around $33,000 for prime healthy male slave in Alabama in 1859, while a 60 year old woman in Virginia in 1810 might be worth a little over $400. That is 2011 dollars.
So, a rich plantation owner would probably not think twice about the second cost, but would have trouble with the first.
That’s in 2011 dollars so it takes into account inflation. But looking at GDP per capita historically (in 2005 dollars which is close-ish) :
Policy Matters: Image (ignore the N. Korea bit)
It seems like the average slave was equivalent to several years of income for the average person. Was that really so?
Incidentally slaves were also hired out; which also discouraged wanton murder. South Carolina College for instance hired slaves. So a slaveowner killing his slaves would be the equivalent of a car rental place intentionally trashing his vehicles; likewise murdering a slave you’d rented off someone would piss off a slaveowner no end and land you in all sorts of legal and financial trouble.
I took a look at the case law when I gave my earlier example of a slaveowner punished for murdering a slave. Cases involving slaveowners were quite unusual, probably a combination of the disincentive a slaveowner had to destroy his own property and the practical difficulties in bringing such a case. There were more cases involving managers or overseers; if, for example, an overseer whipped a valuable slave to death, as happened sometimes, you can see why the owner would be upset and might encourage prosecution. Most cases involved murders by third parties, either unrelated whites or other slaves.
The cost may have been high for a slave, but then keep in mind that the divide between “rich” and “poor” was much much larger then. What may have been several years’ average wages may have been pocket change for the owner of a decent sized plantation.
As mentioned earlier, slaves could not testify in court. Unless family members (or white employees) on the plantation were willing to testify, there was no way to prove what happened - especially by the time someone got around to investigating, the body might be rotting in an unmarked grave, in the days before serious forensic autopsies. The “correction” clause obviously gives a convenient out - all the owner has to do is say he was disciplining the slave for some transgression. If he was smart, he’d say it was for something nobody else was around to see.
One presumes that the few cases that were prosecuted were for other reasons - excessive abuse known to the community, actions done in front of too many witnesses to ignore, actions that seemed to cause unrest among slaves, an unusually ethical prosecutor, etc.
The story of “12 Years A Slave” recounts several incidents of slaves being killed, either deliberately or as a byproduct of excessive discipline, at the time when slaves were already valuable property. Assuming this story is accurate and a valid random slice of southern behaviour, it suggests that death by discipline or white viciousness was not uncommon. However, he was dealt to a slaveholder unscrupulous enough to most likely deal knowingly in falsely apprehended freedmen, so may have ended up with the wrong sort of owners anyway. (And in the end - spoiler - the local authorities had no problem sorting out the situation once his white friends became involved.)
To be fair (if possible) the Germans by contrast were dealing with supply and distribution shortages by the time the war was getting close to the end. Certainly there was a divide of viewing some countries as “civilized, like us” (??) vs. as a bunch of subhumans, but the problem was not so much withholding rations as also a choice of distribution.
One commentator on Roman society pointed out that the Romans thought of having sex with slaves, for example, as “very bad form”. If you want to know what society thinks of as despicable, see what the commentators accuse their enemies of. Not that it did not happen, but socially it was not a “nudge nudge wink wink - we won’t talk of it” thing.
Roman slaves were generally captives of war. You either slaughtered the losers wholesale, or you split them up to be used as labour, but dispersed so they could not get together and create more trouble. (Plus, people falling on hard times could be sold into slavery for debt, IIRC - As a result there were some fairly sophisticated and educated people who were slaves. Slaves in many of these cultures were somewhere half-way to indentured servant category. Some could own their own property, even eventually buy their freedom. Presumably, though, on country plantations far from prying eyes and independent witnesses, anything could also happen. As is common in any society, those with power and position were often immune from legal repercussions over crimes against lower ranks of society. (With the warning that such cases provided leverage should political enemies want to pull them down)
It’s also worth noting that the Roman slave populations wouldn’t typically be in family units nearly as often. Roman slaves were often the survivors of Roman conquests, and the men were typically either killed in the subjugation or they were shipped off to work in mines or such. Given what I know about the way Roman industrial slavery was practiced I suspect Claudius’s rules only applied to a narrow range of slaves who were really more what we’d think “indentured servants.” Basically these were ordinary people who had “devolved into slavery” through getting excessively in debt or something and ended up as a household slave of a wealthy family.
This is often the popular conception of the Roman slave, but in fact Rome was a massive machine ran on slavery for almost all of its agriculture and various other types of industry. Mining in particular was very heavily slave-worked. Industrial slaves so to speak in the Roman times were treated brutally and not in a manner designed to make them a self-perpetuating population. In fact their large rate of attrition was part of a continuous driving influence to wage more wars for much of the period in which Rome had an Empire (this includes the Republican era when Rome had significant colonies and the actual Empire period), although this I believe was less true in the last couple hundred years.
