African American Slave Laws In The 1800s

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States developed several laws designed to guarantee slave subordination and white supremacy through fear, limitation, and degradation. White Americans did not want to chance that slaves would become educated or have the opportunity to unite and initiate a revolt, as the American revolutionaries had just demonstrated against their own British master with success. Slave codes legally degraded slaves and demonstrated white superiority on a personal level through useless laws, such as that which prohibited African Americans from looking any white person in the eye. More useful, however, was the law that slaves could not assemble without supervision of a present white individual and could not gather in numbers greater than three. Laws on assembly, as well as a law that made it illegal to educate a slave or allow them to become literate, would reduce risk of planning riots and escapes, in addition to promoting the general inferiority …show more content…
The ability of white masters to separate families gave the master’s slaves something to lose and provided a reason for slaves to behave and obey him out of fear. On an even more serious note of superior demonstration, laws were created to allow white folk to kill slaves at their own discretion, pleasure, and with total immunity from consequence. On the most fundamental level, this particular law not only separated slaves into inferiority, but also dehumanized them entirely. As the American slave population increased, the fear of slave uprisings equally grew among their white masters and slave codes multiplied and worsened (ushistory.org). The slave codes were sadistic, but largely effective for the white American’s determination to guarantee the safeguard their superiority and free