Slavery preceded the emergence of slave codes in colonial North America. Initially, African-American workers’ legal status was often ambiguous. Some were held in lifelong slavery, others were treated as indentured servants, and some acquired freedom through manumission or self-purchase. The earliest known reference to lifelong, hereditary black slavery occurs not in a law but in a 1640 Virginia court decision. This indicates that colonial courts enforced local customs regarding African-American slavery before slavery was enshrined in law.
Slave codes developed haphazardly in the second half of the 17th century as the number of African and African-American workers in the American colonies grew. Slaves’ activities were restricted: They were forbidden to carry guns, possess liquor, or own property. At the same time, lawmakers closed off possible avenues to freedom by legislating that conversion to Christianity did not justify manumission and that children followed the status of their mother. Laws against miscegenation and interracial marriage separated the social worlds of African-American slaves and poor white settlers and put a premium on “whiteness.” The southern gentry used slave laws as tools for social control; legislators aimed not only to restrict the movements of slaves but also to discourage poor white people from associating with them, lest the two groups cooperate in property crimes or political rebellion.
In 1705 the Virginia legislature codified several decades of legislation pertaining to slaves into a single, massive slave code. Other southern colonial legislatures used the Virginia code and, later, the South Carolina code as models for their own slave codes. (The northern colonies, which were less dependent on slavery, seldom codified their scattered slave legislation into formal slave codes.) Slave codes not only restricted slaves’ economic and social activities but also defined their relationship to the law; slaves were generally forbidden to testify under oath and were subject to the death penalty for many offenses that were not capital crimes when committed by whites. Colonial legislatures often revised slave codes as social and political conditions changed. The South Carolina assembly, for example, issued a revised slave code in the wake of the Stono Rebellion of 1739.
Further reading: Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process in the Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
—Darcy R. Fryer
World History
