Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [56]
All this cruelty and suppression was not random; a pervasive fear of insolence, uprising, and rebellion underlay the slave codes; this tended to put a special spin even on “ordinary” crimes. Thus, one section of the Mississippi laws of 1840 lumped together the crime of rebellion and insurrection; and plotting or conspiring to murder “any free white person.” 23 Whites who objected to slavery or worked against it were also criminalized. In Kentucky, a white who helped slaves escape, or who dared to “advise, counsel, or conspire with a negro, bond or free, and cause him to rebel or make insurrection against the authority of his master or the laws of the land,” was guilty of a crime punishable by death.24 It was even a crime to argue against slavery: under the Virginia Code, for example, if a “free person, by speaking or writing, maintain that owners have not right of property in their slaves,” he could be punished by a jail sentence up to one year, and a fine up to $500.25
Free Blacks
There were also, in the southern states, blacks who were not slaves: the free black population. Southern white society detested these free blacks. (They were not exactly popular in the North, either, and the northern states, in general, granted them only second-class citizenship.) In the years leading up to the Civil War, defenders of slavery grew more tense and felt more threatened; many slaveholders were convinced it was bad for society to allow any blacks to be free. A free black population was an anomaly; moreover, it threatened the very institution of slavery. The destiny of the race was to serve whites, as slaves. Every slave state heaped disabilities on free blacks—to make the point, as a Georgia justice put it, that the “fancied freedom” of the emancipated black was nothing but “a delusion”; that the slave “who receives the care and protection of a tolerable master” was better off than the free black. Free blacks could never enjoy true civil freedom among the whites.26
Criminal law in the southern states tended to lump together all blacks, slave or free. The North Carolina Code of 1855 is full of instances: thus “Any slave, or free negro, or free person of color, convicted of ... an assault with intent to commit a rape, upon the body of a white female, shall suffer death.” The code looked with suspicion on fraternization between free and unfree blacks; it was a crime for a free black to marry or “cohabit” with a slave, or, for that matter, to play with any slave “at any game of cards, dice, or nine pins,” or “at any game of chance, hazard, or skill, for money, liquor or any thing of value.” Nor was any free black to “entertain any slave in his house, during Sunday, or in the night between sunset and sunrise.” Free blacks were subject to many disabilities; they were not to “hawk or peddle” without a license; or carry a “shot-gun, musket, rifle, pistol, sword, dagger, or bowie-knife” without a license; or sell liquor.27 The Virginia law that made it a crime to use “provoking language or menacing gestures” to a white person, applied to any “negro,” not just a slave.28
Free blacks were subject to fines for many of these offenses, and often to whipping as well. Playing cards with a slave, for example, could earn a free black up to “thirty-nine lashes on his bare back” under the North Carolina Code. If a free black was unable to pay the fine,” the sheriff could auction off his labor, for up to five years, ”publicly at the court house door ... to any person who will pay the fine;” and the hirer would have the same “rights to control the services of, such free negro, as