slave code
Enslaved persons' regulations
Slave codes were laws in the American South and Caribbean colonies that defined enslaved people as property and regulated their treatment, movement, and behavior.
These statutes restricted enslaved people from learning to read, assembling without white supervision, or leaving plantations without written permission.
Slave codes also prescribed punishments for resistance and set rules for buying and selling human beings.
The Virginia slave code of 1705 consolidated earlier legislation into a comprehensive system of racial control.
- masterAuthority or controller
- servitudeCompulsory labor under masters
- manumissionFormal freeing of enslaved
- chattelMovable personal property
- plantationLarge-scale farming operation
plantation economy · cotton fields · Dred Scott decision · slaveholding · racial hierarchy · forced labor · freedom · abolition movement · human chattel · auction block · property rights · indentured servitude · Kansas-Nebraska Act · colonial exploitation · coercion · fetter · shackle · triangular trade
- slaverybondage, chattel, thrall, Middle Passage, slaveholders
- Slavery Historyabolitionism, abolitionist, antislavery, Frederick Douglass, Emancipation Proclamation
- slave lawspass laws, curfew laws, inheritance laws, inheritance rules, marriage bans
- Abolitionismabolitionists, abolitionist movement, antislavery, abolitionism, Frederick Douglass
- legal documentscontract, affidavit, deed, will, subpoena
slave codebill of rights
Document listing protected liberties
civil rights legislation · human rights charter · civil liberties · citizenship laws · Fourteenth Amendment
slave, code, slaves, slaved, slaving, slavery, slavish, slavishly, enslaved