So it is (say) 1860, I am in Mississippi, in the American deep South, I got acres of money.
**Were there any legal restrictions on how I could treat or use a slave? **
While I understand there were moral restrictions, people frowned on openly raping or hanging slaves in incorporated towns, what did the law say?
Can we think of any actions taken against a slave-owner for mistreatment?
I know that Mississippi passed a slave code in 1822 that remained in force, with amendments, until emancipation. I’m having trouble finding it, and most of the excerpts I’ve found deal with restrictions on the slaves themselves. I did find this provision, though:
I don’t know to what extent this was ever enforced, especially because another law said that a black person couldn’t sue or give testimony in a court against a white person.
Thank you, so there were legal provisions. Anyone got anything else?
Probably not what you are looking for… but you could not buy and import African slaves in 1860. That had been banned some time before.
And there were some issues about where you could take your slaves. If you brought them into areas where slavery was illegal, the might no longer be your slaves. There was some kerfluffle about this prior to the Civil War. IIRC Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act which allowed owners to travel virtually anywhere in the US to retrieve runaway slaves, by force if necessary.
I found this rather dense paper, which may ne of some interest:
Securing the Leg Irons: Restriction of Legal Rights for Slaves in Virginia and Maryland, 1625 - 1791
There is relatively little consideration of what behavior was acceptable by slave owners. It focuses more on how the law dealt with the very concept of slavery.
Here’s another interesting encyclopedia article on the subject. The rules varies widely from place to place.
In some places, you could not
-teach your slaves to read and write.
-allow them to carry firearms.
-use them to collect money from white people.
-free them.
-let them sit idle for extended periods.
There is one relevant legal case cited:
52 years before, in 1808.
I don’t know if he was related to North Carolina Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin, but an Edmund Ruffin is usually credited with firing the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, although that’s disputed. These Ruffins had their hands all over slavery!
Lots of interesting stuff in The Statute Laws of the State of Tennessee (1831), including:
For a more general summary of the status immediately pre-Civil War:
Thank you all.
Not that this is really what you were asking, but presumably there was some system of penalties for someone who harmed someone else’s slave.
The comparison is odious but true: slaves had essentially the same legal status that dogs have in modern society. White people were forbidden from committing certain acts of cruelty against a slave but it was considered more on the basis of maintaining social order rather than a recognition that the slave had any rights as an individual.
I’d be very surprised if there weren’t a civil action available in tort. Slaves are property. If you smash my TV, I’ve a cause of action against you. Same would hold, I should think, if you injure my slave. The only caveat being that, on this theory, I’m not sure I’d have a cause of action against you if you struck a slave without injuring him or her (and thus impairing his/her ability to work for me). A slave with a black eye isn’t significantly less productive, for example, than one without; but a slave with a broken arm certainly is.
(Obviously, I’m not speaking in defense of this hypothetical standard - slavery is a horrible thing. I’m just trying to reason out how the law would have worked.)
Can someone who kills a dog be charged with murder?
A comparison to horses is probably more accurate than to dogs. Slaves were generally thought of as intelligent (compared to other animals) livestock.
Right, because we can’t allow for the possibility that slaveowners had any humanity whatsoever. :rolleyes:
I suspect many took New Testament injunctions against abuse of slaves to heart.
According to my first link, in TN assaulting someone else’s slave was legally equivalent to assaulting a white.
Okay, then I’ll ask whether someone who kills a horse can be charged with murder?
I’m sure they can’t, which is why I sidestepped your question earlier. 
As usual, there’s no perfect analogy. I would say that slaves’ legal position was somewhere between that of women and that of livestock. I mentioned horses because I think it makes a better overall comparison than dogs, but certainly slaves weren’t regarded as equivalent to horses in all aspects, rather just in some.
Your knee appears to be jerking there. You might want to get that checked.
The point I made was that the slaveowners were being held to a standard of humanity. But the people who were holding them to that standard were their peers not their slaves. A white person who wantonly killed a slave would have been regarded as having done something seriously wrong - but because of the violence of the act not because he violated the slave’s rights. Society thought it was wrong for slaveowners to kill, not for slaves to be killed.
And that’s the comparison I made to the status of a dog in modern society. If we hear that somebody beat a dog to death, we’re shocked and we want that person to be punished. But that doesn’t mean we recognize that the dog had a fundamental right to life. Dogs die all the time - they’re euthanized in pounds, they starve to death in the wild, they get run over by cars. It’s the act of violence that disturbs us not the victim. We regard somebody beating an animal to death as something unnatural and inhuman. And we react against the inhumanity - not in defense of the dog.
This being GQ…cites?
I’d say you are wrong on both counts. Your take on this discounts the possibility of feeling empathy either for a dog or a slave.