Race, Crime, and the Law Timeline

Race, Crime, and the Law Timeline

Chapters 1-3

1619- A "Dutch Man of War" sells "twenty and odd negars [Negroes]" to the "Cape merchant" of

the Virginia Company in Jamestown.

1798- Andrew Fede "Slave Abuse" A North Carolina statue declared the killing of a slave to be

a felony, but then added that the statue should not extend "to any person killingÐ'...any slave in the act of resistance to his lawful owner or master, or any slave dying under moderate correction. (p. 30)

1820- State v. Tackett, a case in which the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed the

conviction of a white man prosecuted for murdering a slave. The conflict between the deceased slave and the defendant stemmed from an illicit sexual relationship between the defendant and the wife of the slave, a free black woman. At trial, the defendant sought to introduce evidence that the slave was "a turbulent manÐ'...insolent and impudent to white people." The judge, however, excluded this testimony and instructed the jury that the case "was to be determined by the same rules and principles of law as if the deceased has been a white man." The Supreme Court decided that this standard and the evidentiary ruling to which it gave rise were erroneous. (p. 32)

1821- The South Carolina legislature made the willful, malicious, and deliberate killing of a slave

a capital offense. Although several motivations combined to produce this and similar reforms, one of the most important was a desire to protect slave owners' economic investment in their human property against the depredations of resentful poor whites.

(p. 31-32)

1829- State v. Mann, perhaps the best known of all the cases relating to slavery and criminal

laws. The defendant, John Mann, leased from an owner a slave named Lydia. During her period of bondage to Mann, Lydia committed what the North Carolina Supreme Court describes as "some small offense, for which the [D]fendant undertook to chastise her." The court does not specify what sort of chastisement was attempted but does indicate that Lydia tried to run away. When she disregarded Mann's order to stop, he shot and wounded her. Mann was indicted and convicted for assault and battery, a remarkable event given the difficulties that authorities faced in bringing criminal prosecutions against whites for inflicting violence upon blacks. (p. 33)

1840's- Both the Alabama (Nelson v. State, 1844) and Tennessee (Grandison (a slave) v. State,

1841) Supreme Courts reversed convictions for rape because of the failure of prosecutors to specify in the indictments that the victims were white, even though at the trial the prosecution offered ample proof of this fact as well as the slaves' guilt. (p. 78)

1842- The Negro Seamen Acts show vividly the extent to which the slave South subjected all

blacks, not just slaves, to racially oppressive criminal laws. These laws provided that any blacks on board a ship in a South Carolina or Louisiana harbor would be imprisoned throughout the period during which the ship remained in harbor. Enacted after discovery of plans for a slave rebellion in South Carolina, these laws were intended to insulate the slave population from the "contagion of liberty" that might be spread by free black seamen. (p. 81)

January 1842- Although the great majority of Northern whites perceived blacks as a racially inferior caste, many also disliked slavery, and even more, resented efforts by white Southerners to spread proslavery mores and practices across the nation. This resentment, allied with abolitionist sentiments, provided the basis for what came to be known as "personal liberty laws," which gave some degree of protection in the North to free blacks and fugitive slaves. The Supreme Court disagreed, however, ruling in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that under the federal constitution states did not have the authority to regulate slaveowners pursuing their fugitive human property. (p. 83)

1846- In all of the Southern States and in several of the Northern ones, blacks (regardless of

their status as slaves or freedpeople) were barred from testifying against whites. (p. 37)

1850- Souther v. The Commonwealth of Virginia, in Hanover, Virginia, Souther was convicted of

murdering Sam, one of his slaves, during the course of punishing him for drunkenness. Sam was tied to a tree and whipped with switches. When Souther became fatigued with the labour of whipping, he called upon a Negro man of his, and made him cob Sam with a shingle. And after cobbing and whipping, he applied fire to the body of the slave, about his back, belly, and private parts. He then caused him to be washed down with hot water, in which pods of red pepper had been steeped. The Negro was also tied to a log and to the bed post with roped which choked him, and he was kicked and stamped by Souther. This sort of punishment was continued and repeated until the Negro died under its infliction. Sam Souther was sentenced to only five years' imprisonment for his horrific murder of Sam. (p. 31)

1850- Spencer v. State, The Supreme of Alabama overturned a guilty verdict against a slave

charged with murdering a white man on the grounds that one of his jurors had only a share in an undistributed estate of slaves, whereas state laws required a juror in a case against a slave to be a full owner of at least one slave. (p. 78-79)

1850- Ann v. State, a slave was charged with killing her master's baby. Immediately following

the baby's death, the master struck the defendant and threatened to shoot her. A day later, the defendant confessed to two overseers. The state argued that the confession had been properly admitted into evidence because the defendant was no longer imminent danger of violence when she confessed. The Tennessee Supreme Court rejected the state's argument, holding that, the confession could not be viewed as truly voluntary. (p. 79)

September 18, 1850- Congress and the President enacted a statue, the Fugitive Act of 1850, which created a federal bureaucracy to aid slaveowners in the capture and return of