User:Micahabresch/sandbox-slavecodes

Slave Codes are the subset of laws regarding slavery and enslaved people, specifically in the Americas. Most slave codes were concerned the rights and duties of free people in regards to enslaved people. Slave codes left a great deal unsaid, with much of the actual practice of slavery being a matter of traditions rather than formal law.

The primary colonial powers all had slightly different slave codes. The French, after 1685, had the Code Noir specifically for this purpose. The Spanish had some laws regarding slavery in Las Siete Partidas, although it was not comprehensive. The English colonies largely had their own local slave codes, mostly based on the codes of either Barbados or Virginia. After gaining independence, most states in the United States kept the slave codes they had before independence, although they began to diverge after that point.

In addition to the these national and state- or colony-level slave codes, there were city ordinances and other local restrictions regarding slaves.

Typical Slave Codes

There are many similarities between the various slave codes. The most common elements are:

• Movement Restrictions: Most regions required any slaves away from their plantations or outside of the cities they resided in to have a pass signed by their master (list of codes here). Many cities in the slave-states required slave-tags, small copper badges that enslaved people wore, to show that slaves were allow to go move about.
• Marriage Restrictions: Most places restricted the marriage rights of enslaved people, ostensibly to prevent them from trying to change masters by marrying into a family on another plantation.
• Prohibitions on Gathering: Slave codes usually prevented large groups of enslaved people away from their plantations outside of very specific circumstances.
• Slave Patrols: In the slave-dependent portions of North America, varying degrees of legal authority backed patrols by plantation owners and other free whites to ensure that enslaved people were not free to move about at night, and to generally enforce the restrictions on slaves.
• Trade and Commerce by Slaves: Initially, most places gave enslaved people some land to work personally and allowed them to operate their own markets. As slavery became more profitable, slave codes restricting the rights of enslaved people to buy, sell, and produce goods were restricted. In some places, slave tags were required to be borne by enslaved people to prove that they were allowed to participate in certain types of work.

Slave Codes of the English Colonies and the United States

There was no central English slave code, with each colony forming its own code. After winning their independence, the individual states ratified new constitutions, but their laws were generally a continuation of the laws those regions maintained prior to that point, their slave codes remaining unchanged.

The first comprehensive English slave code was from Barbados in 1661. Modifications of the Barbadian slave codes were put in place in Jamaica in 1664, and were then greatly modified in 1684. The Barbadian codes were copied by and South Carolina in 1691. The South Carolina slave code served as the model for other colonies in North America. In 1770, Georgia adopted the South Carolina slave code, and Florida adopted the Georgia code.

Virginia's slave codes were made in parallel to those in Barbados, with individual laws starting in 1667 and a comprehensive slave code passed in 1705. The slave codes of the tobacco colonies (Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia) were modeled on the Virginia code.

The northern colonies developed their own slave codes at later dates, with New York passing a comprehensive code in 1702.

Slavery was restricted throughout the British Empire by the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which prevented trading slaves, but did not actually end slavery. In 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act ended slavery throughout the British Empire.

In the United States, there was a division between slave states and free states, roughly along the "Mason-Dixon Line", a division formalized in the Missouri Compromise (refer to Mason-Dixon line page for reference). At the start of the Civil War, there were 34 states in the United States, 15 of which were slave states, all of which had slave codes. The 19 free states did not have slave codes, although they still had laws regarding slavery and en-slaved people, covering such concerns as how to handle slaves from slave-states, whether they were runaways or with their owners.

Slavery was not banned nationwide in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865. Earlier national laws greatly regulating slavery in the United States were the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves on 1 January 1808 which made it a felony to import slaves from abroad, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required runaway enslaved people found in free states to be returned to their owners in the South.

French Slave Codes

The French colonies were the only portion of the Americas to have an effective slave code applied from the center of the empire. King Louis XIV applied the Code Noir in 1685, and it was adopted by Saint-Domingue in 1687 and the West Indies in 1687, Guyana in 1704, Reunion in 1723, and Louisiana in 1724. It was never applied in Canada, which had very few slaves. The Code Noir was developed in part to combat the spread of Protestantism and thus focuses more on religious restrictions than other slave codes. The Code was updated in 1724.

New Orleans developed slave codes under Spain, France, and the United States, due Louisiana changing hands several times, resulting in a very complex set of slave codes. The needs of the locals usually held in favor of any outside laws.

France abolished slavery after the revolution, first by freeing second-generation slaves in 1794.

Spanish Slave Codes

In practice, the slave codes of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were local laws, similar to those in other regions. There was an avenue for manumission for slaves, but it wasn't used notably more often than the avenues for manumission in other regions.

There was an overarching slave-code, Las Siete Partidas, which granted many specific rights to the slaves in these regions, but there is almost no record of it actually being used to benefit the slaves in the Americas. Las Siete Partidas was compiled in the thirteenth century, long before the colonization of the new world, and its treatment of slavery was based on the Roman tradition. Frank Tannenbaum, an influential sociologist who wrote on the treatment of slaves in the Americas treated the laws in Las Siete Partidas as an accurate reflection of treatment, but later scholarship has moved away from this viewpoint, arguing that it did not reflect actual practices.

An attempt to unify the Spanish slave codes, the Codigo Negro, was cancelled without ever going into effect because it was too unpopular with the slave-owners in the Americas.

The Laws of the Indies were an ongoing body of laws, modified throughout the history of the Spanish colonies, that incorporated many slave laws in the later versions.

Specific Slave Codes

• Barbados Slave Codes
• Code Noir; French black code
• New York Slave Codes
• South Carolina Slave Codes
• Virginia Slave Codes of 1705

See also

• Anti-literacy laws in the United States
• Atlantic slave trade
• Conscription
• Convict leasing
• Coolie
• Debt bondage
• Forced labor
• Human trafficking
• Indentured servants
• International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition
• Slave narrative
• Slave rebellion
• Slave Trade Acts
• Slave trade
  • Janissaries
  • Mamluks
  • Saqaliba
• Slavery at common law in the British Empire
• Slavery in Africa
• Slavery in Canada
• Slavery in the colonial United States
• Slavery in the United States
  • Origins of the American Civil War
  • North Carolina v. Mann
• Unfree labour
• Wage slavery