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29 Am. J. Legal Hist. 93 (1985)
Legitimized Violent Slave Abuse in the American South, 1619-1865: A Case Study of Law and Social Change in Six Southern States

handle is hein.journals/amhist29 and id is 103 raw text is: Legitimized Violent Slave Abuse in the American South, 1619-1865: A Case Study of Law and Social Change in Six Southern States by ANDREW FEDE* I. INTRODUCTION The nineteenth-century criminal law of slavery includes stat- utes and cases that appeared to protect slaves from violent white abuse. But the law actually had a legitimizing purpose and effect; the lawmakers of Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama decriminalized white violence to the extent that they thought it was a necessary or ordinary incident of slav- ery.1 Nevertheless, more white violence was legalized in the colonial era than in the antebellum years. Therefore, it is necessary to first examine the colonial origins of the law of white slave abuse, and then trace its development in the later colonial and antebellum period. The earliest colonial English slave owners had to confront head on the essence of slavery; what Harriet Beecher Stowe called abso- *Member of the New Jersey Bar, J. D., 1982, Rutgers Law School-Newark, N. J. This article began as a paper for a Fall 1980 seminar on Law and Social Change in U. S. History conducted by Professor James C. N. Paul at Rutgors Law School. I especially thank Professor Paul, as well as Professor John Anthony Scott and the anonymous reader for reviewing drafts of this article. 1. For a general discussion of Max Weber's views of the legitimi:zing function of law, see Trubek, Max Weber on Law and the Rise of Capitalism, 19'2 Wis L. REV., 720, 720-26. Weber argues that modern law legitimized state power and 'domina- tion, but slave law legitimized the power of white southerners to dominate slaves; thus the white man's word was law to the slave.

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