I was listening to a public radio show this evening that interviewed a Southerner who had changed his mind about the Confederate battle flag in part because of something he found when doing geneology research. An ancestor of his had petitioned the county court for permission to castrate one of his slaves. :eek:
The guy they were interviewing was understandably horrified by this. It is unquestionably a disturbing notion. But I was actually surprised that he had to petition the court at all. It is often maintained that slaves’ status was no different, essentially, than that of livestock. And one certainly doesn’t have to get a court’s permission to geld a bull. (Right?)
I suppose there’s one clear way in which slaves had a higher legal status than animals: they were counted, at a discounted rate of 60%, in determining the number of seats Southern states controlled in the House. But a slave did not get 60% of a vote (or any percent), so it’s hard to see how that can be seen as any kind of individual legal protection.
I have actually never before heard of any even implied legal protection of an enslaved African American in the antebellum South, other than cases like Solomon Northup’s, where his allies were able to legally show in court what his true name was and that he was a legally emancipated Northern black man. But for someone who is unambiguously enslaved, according to the laws of that time, I had no idea there was any kind of law curtailing what could be done to them by their “rightful owners”.
The laws varied from state to state. In general, slave laws were put into place as soon as the U.S. became a country after the Revolutionary war, to define exactly the rights and responsibilities of both the slaves and the slave owners.
Typically, these slave laws were pretty harsh against slaves. For example, any slave caught off of his master’s property unaccompanied by a white person was assumed to be an escaped slave and could be put to death. If a slave hit his master or any member of his master’s family, that slave could be put to death. It was even illegal to teach slaves to read and write in some areas.
On the other hand, there was actually some protection for the slave in these laws. If a slave was cruelly mistreated, a judge could order the sale of that slave to a better master. A master couldn’t just outright murder one of his slaves. That was considered to be an actual murder. However, if the slave died as a result of resisting being punished, then the slave master got off free.
Note that slaves are guaranteed the right to a jury trial for serious crimes, although technically that law was at least partially to protect the slave owner from losing his slave to false allegations.
It also states that anyone who maliciously dismembers or kills a slave will suffer the same punishment as if they had done the same thing to a white person.
Was skin color explicitly enshrined in the laws? Slaves could be emancipated, so there were free black men. Conversely, did the laws allow for white-skinned slaves, in principle, if there had been some non-African source of slaves?
But the PDF gives why such a law was totally useless… the exceptions
"Unless it occurred as a form of punishment " or “due to punishment,the slave died”.
There was a (very bad) assumption that the slave owner wouldn’t hurt his slave as an abuse or maliciously… because the slave was valuable.
So how could the slave owner or overseer be prosecuted in court ?
By his friend the towns prosecutor ? No they’d do lip service to the idea.
They’d recite the law… and then ignore it …
Its unheard of that the victim gets to have his own lawyer act as a proxy-prosecutor in the criminal case and present an alternative case to the one the government’s prosecutor was presenting…
If the victim needed a new witness to prove he was still the victim, how could he get a new witness to the stand , the prosecutor and defendant wouldn’t agree to that !
So “the assumption” was that the exception was often a valid excuse in the court. The defendant would just have to say “But I was just punishing him by dunking him in water” and then the drowning was legal…
land ownership was also victim to assumption …"if they had a valid complaint, take it up at the higher court ! assumption, they didnt have rights until they proved they did… "
In australia land was claimed for the british on the basis that the natives couldn’t give a definite border to their land, therefore the land was unowned… “terra nullus”.
The major maritime powers like England & Spain had already outlawed slavery, and importing of slaves had been cut off, so breeding & raising slaves in this country was about the only source of supply.
There were moderate northerners who thought slavery would die out because of a lack of slaves. And some southerner slave owners feared that too, and so they worried about the loss of ‘good breeding stock’. That was one of the reasons for laws like this.
Note – some purebred horse breeds are currently in decline, with a continuing loss of numbers. So some of them have started to make it a bit harder to castrate a stallion. Like recording a castration on the registration papers used to be done for free or a nominal charge; but now this is a much higher fee. (I don’t know of any horse breed where you need permission from the Registry before castrating a stallion – at least, not yet.)
So you’re saying the need for a court order was due to not wanting to restrict the fertility of the enslaved population? Interesting. I would think this would be more of a function of the number of fertile women, but based on what you are saying about stallions, maybe not.
So what would such a person argue in court as a reason to do this castration? Any idea how common this was?
Huh. I didn’t know this. Are there any documented cases where an owner was actually convicted of murder? It’s hard for me to imagine a bunch of white jurors coming down with a guilty verdict.
There’s a popular misconception that slaves were considered legally non-human. False, totally false.
The problem was that slaves and free blacks weren’t allowed to be on juries, and weren’t allowed to testify against white people. So yes, it was illegal for a white person to harm a slave, but if a white person did, how could the legal system address it? A slave, in theory, had legal protections, but in practice had none.
Historically, there have been a lot of them. Castration was believed to eliminate various mental disorders as well as sexual desire. There was also a lot of paranoia about blacks raping white women (see “Birth of a Nation” eighty years or so later). It would not surprise me if an owner would want to castrate a house slave that cared for or protected a woman or girl family member, for much the same reason as harem guards were often eunuchs.
If the punishments must occur in this order and only this order, it stands to reason that the owner would have to petition the court to carry out the punishment. He probably had to sign a sworn statement or something explaining how the slave had committed his fourth offense, detailing the previous three instances and the punishments received for each.
Sort off, under the one-drop rule someone with 1 black grandparent & 7 white grandparents would still be considered black regardless of skin complexion or hair texture. Abolitionists in the North even staged mock slave auctions using “octaroon” women who looked as white as the women in the audience to arouse public support for ending slavery. The one-drop rule tended not to actually be written into state laws until after the Civil War.
Debunkings of the idea that slavery in a particular time/place had reduced slaves to the literal status of livestock are pretty classic strawman arguments used to morally excuse slavery in not just the American south, but elsewhere in the New World, in Islamic countries, in ancient Rome, and far beyond. Everywhere slavery existed it was “more complicated” than that but everywhere it existed it was condemnable. I’m glad that the person mentioned in the OP reacted the way he did.
Anyone with 8 grandparents would be a genetic wonder!
Actually, the “one drop rule” varied from state to state. But one reason it was rarely codified into law as literally “the one drop rule” before the Civil War is that people were still living in a time when they knew that almost any white person could have “one drop” of African Ancestry.
To be fair, the Early American Republic — of which confederates and neo-confederates considered themselves the purer representatives — was very consciously modelled on the ancient Roman Republic; particularly with the Neo-Classical Zeitgeist. Which did permit the murder of slaves at will. And practically anyone else that moved.
