Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [310]
2 George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South 1854), pp. 46, 247-48.
3 Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (1982), pp. 73, 100.
4 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, Vol. 2 (1862) pp. 202-6.
5 Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (ed., John A. Scott, 1984), pp. 79-80.
6 Public Acts of the Territory of Florida (1839), p. 225.
7 Daniel J. Flanigan, The Criminal Law of Slavery and Freedom, 1800-1868 (1987), pp. 74, 78; English’s Dig. Stats. Ark. (1848), chap. 51, part 12, sec. 4, p. 379.
8 See Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (2d ed., 1985), p. 222.
9 Stats. Miss. 1840, pp. 170-72.
10 Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (1988), p. 13.
11 Flanigan, Criminal Law of Slavery, pp. 86-88.
12 Michael S. Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (1980), pp. 139, 141-42.
13 Public Acts of the Terr. of Florida (1839), p. 224.
14 Hindus, Prison and Plantation, p. 145. Imprisonment, according to Hindus, was “unpopular,” because it deprived the owner of the slave’s valuable services and “forced owners to endanger the health of their slaves in the notorious, overcrowded, and decrepit local jails.”
15 Quoted in Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (1984), p. 61. After 1818, according to Ayers, “only Louisiana consistently admitted slaves to its prison as an alternative to hanging.”
16 Schwarz, Twice Condemned, pp. 209-10.
17 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, p. 136.
18 Laws La. 1854, Act. No. 215, p. 149.
19 See, for instance, Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, 1830, p. 17.
20 Code of Va. 1849, Title 54, chap. 199, sec. 8, p. 754.
21 Hotchkiss’s Ga. Stats. (1845), pp. 810, 811.
22 Ibid., pp. 812-14.
23 Stats. Miss. 1840, chap. xi, sec. 34, p. 163.
24 Rev. Stats. Ky, 1852, chap. 28, Art. 3, sec. 3, p. 248. The jury could provide, in its discretion, for confinement to the penitentiary for a minimum of six or a maximum of ten years as an alternative to the death penalty.
25 Code Va. 1849, Tit. 54, chap. 198, sec. 22, pp. 745-46. The offender “may be arrested, and carried before a justice, by any white person.”
26 Lumpkin, J., in Bryan v. Walton, 14 Ga. 185 (1853).
27 Rev. Code No. Car. 1855, chap. 107, pp. 576-77.
28 Code Va. 1849, Title 54, chap. 200, sec. 8, p. 754.
29 Rev. Code No. Car. 1854, chap. 107, sec. 63, sec. 75. Whites were not to gamble with slaves either, Laws. No. Car. 1851, chap. 186.
30 Tenn. Code 1858, sec. 2726.
31 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1947), p. 213.
32 Laws No. Car. 1774, chap. 31; Laws No. Car. 1791, chap. 4; the laws are quoted in Paul Finkelman, ed., The Law of Freedom and Bondage: A Casebook (1986), pp. 200-201.
33 Ark. Const., 1836, Art. 4, sec. 25 (the same section provided that courts had to assign counsel to slaves in capital cases); Stats. Miss. 1840, chap. xi, sec. 28, p. 162.
34 See, for example, A. E. Keir Nash, “A More Equitable Past? Southern Supreme Courts and the Protection of the Antebellum Negro,” North Carolina Law Review 48:197 (1970); “Reason of Slavery: Understanding the Judicial Role in the Peculiar Institution,” Vanderbilt Law Review 32:7 (1979).
35 See, for example, Dig. Laws Miss. 1839, p. 749: “Any negro or mulatto, bond or free, shall be a good witness in pleas of the state [that is, criminal cases] for or against negroes or mulattoes, or in civil cases where free negroes or mulattoes shall alone be parties, and in no other cases whatsoever.”
36 Hindus, Prison and Plantation, p. 134.
37 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, pp. 134-35.
38 State v. Tackett, 8 No. Car. 210 (1820).
39 State v. Abram, a Slave, 10 Ala. 928 (1847).
40 Ibid., 930-31. The slave was tried under a statute that made it a capital crime for a slave to maim a white person