1. What specific restrictions are placed on slaves?
Slaves were not allowed to own a property, participate in social activities such as elections and were not given a humane treatment. Due to discrimination black skinned individuals who were deemed as free men were given the same restrictions.
2. How did free blacks respond to the slave codes?
Slavery in the Americas introduced the troubling element of race into the master/slave relationship. For the first time in history, dark skin became the social marker of chattel slavery. And, as a means of justifying this new face which is a black face given to an ancient practice, the slavers and their supporters created a race-specific ideology of condemnation. Two and one-quarter centuries of human debasement and degradation denied slaves, not only their basic humanity, but also the opportunity to develop resources that could be used for their own empowerment and later bequeathed to future generations of blacks. Slavery harmed the slaves by creating capital deficiencies or developmental encumbrances within the slave community. These capital deficiencies can be delineated as follows: basic capital, meaning the denial of life, liberty, and human dignity; financial capital, consisting of labor, property, and investments; human capital, denoting formal education, skills, and talent; and social capital, referring to the way in which a group is viewed by other groups within the society. Slavery imposed capital deficiencies on all blacks, not just the slaves. Both the magnitude and details of these deficiencies can be gleaned from a quick look at the legal status and life experiences of slaves and free blacks alike (Finkelman & Urofsky 2002). Free blacks lived in uneasy coexistence with the peculiar institution. Even a free black living in the North was not really free. His freedom was relative; he was freer than a slave but considerably less free than a white person. Because Northern black communities were embedded in a nation that presumed black people to be slaves, black communities cannot be included in free society. Free blacks were excluded from much of the political, economic, educational, and social life of the North. The irony is that this was a region where slavery over time became less profitable than in the South, and where the white population relative to the black population was numerous and rapidly increasing. Northern whites seemed to agonize over the peculiarity of slavery in the land of liberty more so than southern whites. The overwhelming majority of free blacks in the South, like their brethren in the North, were denied the opportunity to create or develop financial, human, or social capital. They faced racial subordination at every turn, sternly excluded from all social equality with the whites, from all political franchises and most civil rights (Brooks 2004). Free blacks were at first adamant of the slave codes because most of them have learned not to trust the white people. Once they saw that the slave codes benefitted the slaves they reduced the fears against it.
3. What did abolitionists do in response to the slave codes?
World developments created and recreated periods of ideological crisis for the Old South. Crises of confidence in the taken-for-granted productions and reproductions of Southern life exacerbated the ideological contradictions between such concepts as freedom and slavery, setting in motion the dissolution of the dominant discourse that supported the natural order of Southern life. This crisis which detained 90 percent of blacks in bondage; then there was the racialist structure of the society, a moral and social order that privileged whites and stereotyped blacks as either subservient or subversive; and finally, there was the resurgence of the long-held Anglo-American desire for African colonization (McInerney 1994). Alongside their efforts to find their own voice and oppose colonization, free blacks sought to convert white abolitionists from gradualism to a more radical abolitionist program, the immediate end of slavery. With the 1820s social climate favoring reform, blacks had some success with an increase in anti vice activity against alcohol abuse, prostitution, and illiteracy, but the American Colonization Society, too, was thriving with the support of white abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. A byproduct of the emerging radical abolitionist movement was the demise of organized, white public antislavery activity in the South. All this Northern activism, however, emerged against the backdrop of Southern slavery and black agitation opposing it (Gordon 2003). The abolitionists made sure that the slave codes were really beneficial to slaves. If they believe that a certain part of the slave code was causing problems then they had it changed to a better policy.
4. When and how did the codes change?
The codes changed whenever there are threats of slave rebellions and violence. The abolitionists and activists made sure that whenever the slave codes does not bring benefits to slaves then it must be altered. The slave code was ended after there were laws that protected the rights of individuals. The slave code was deemed as unimportant once there were more powerful and specific laws that pertain to the rights of individuals. This came during the time when laws that practiced the respect of human rights flourished.
References
Brooks, RL 2004, Atonement and forgiveness: A new model for
black reparations, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Finkelman, P & Urofsky, MI 2002, March of liberty: A
constitutional history of the United States, Oxford University
Press, New York.
Gordon, DB 2003, Black Identity: Rhetoric, ideology, and
nineteenth-century Black Nationalism, Southern Illinois
University Press, Carbondale, IL.
McInerney, DJ 1994, The fortunate heirs of freedom: Abolition &
Republican thought, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment