Southern Slavery and Antebellum Law: Modifications Suited to the State and Master Class
#History: A Journal of Student Research
Volume 2 Conflict & Law
Article 5
6-2018
Southern Slavery and Antebellum Law:
Modifications Suited to the State and Master Class
Steven J. Casement
Le Moyne College
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Repository Citation
Casement, Steven J. (2018) "Southern Slavery and Antebellum Law: Modifications Suited to the State and Master Class," #History: A
Journal of Student Research: Vol. 2 , Article 5.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/hashtaghistory/vol2/iss1/5
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SOUTHERN SLAVERY AND ANTEBELLUM LAW:
MODIFICATIONS SUITED TO THE STATE AND MASTER CLASS
Steven J. Casement, Le Moyne College
During the Antebellum period, the United States’ slave law began changing in both the North and
the South. On a state-by-state basis, laws were made, reformed, or removed to fit the time. Some
states began amending laws in ways that appeared to benefit the slave. What the slaves and the
slave-owners both knew though, and as historian Eugene Genovese claimed, was that “slave laws
existed as a moral guide and an instrument for emergency use, although the legal profession and
especially Southern judges struggled to enforce them as a matter of positive law; wherever
possible, the authority of the master class, considered as a perfectly proper system of
complementary plantation law, remained in effect.”1 However, as the North began moving on a
more progressive path to reform, the South remained rooted in the sort of reactionary legal culture
expected of the paternalistic, agricultural, slaveholder.
In the slave South, the legal system that emerged during the Antebellum period was built
on several different foundations. These foundations of slavery were also the foundations of
Southern culture, economy and overall way of life. The South was built on an agricultural system
designed to produce high-demand products for export outside of the southern United States. To
stay within the confines of an agricultural economy for the South, also meant in their view, staying
within the system of slavery. Since English common law did not recognize hereditary unfree labor,
the master class saw that it needed laws that would protect their interests. In fact, the complex
Southern legal system was an extensive construct that balanced several interests. These included:
the control, obedience and submissiveness of slaves; economic interests or the investment amount
in the slave and the desire in long-run profits; the interest in continuing the plantation-style system
of the South; and the master class’ control over working class overseers, the poor, and other
whites.2 It was these components that slave law of the Antebellum period attempted to meet. With
the lack of a unified government particular to the South as a whole, it was up to each individual
state to establish and enforce this legal structure in the Southern slavery-state system.
The South experienced several noticeable changes before and throughout the Antebellum
period that instilled a new sense of anxiety in the master class. Those who could afford large
numbers of slaves found it more and more difficult to find slaves at prices they had paid in the
past, due to the 1807 ban on the Atlantic Slave Trade. In Georgia for example, the average price
of a “prime field hand” rose from $450 dollars in 1800 to $1,650 in 1859, even as the average New
York price of upland cotton dropped by almost twenty cents.3 As the cost of owning slaves
increased, so did the importance of the slave himself.
Despite the rising price of owning a slave, slave sales continued to skyrocket in the years
just after the War of 1812. Around that time, the master class began to worry about the increasing
percentage of the enslaved population. In fact by 1860, four states had slaves accounting for more
Casement / “Southern Slavery and Antebellum Law”
than one-third of their total population. In South Carolina, the number was as high as sixty
percent.4 This essence of this type of economy contributed to a “social and economic class
structure” that was based largely on wealth valued through the amount of slaves rather than amount
of specie.5 The master class feared the increasing number of slaves, believed it to be a precursor
to rebellion, and on occasion passed laws to limit the number of African-Americans.6 The master
class began moving toward a new phase of plantation-style life with a more limited number of
African-Americans, which historian Andrew Fede describes as the “mature plantation period.”7
Doing so meant limiting a master’s right to property, which was not something that the
South was known for doing in order to maintain their socioeconomic system and the balance of
interests in the Southern states. Pro-slavery advocates attempted to focus their property rights
argument down to two basic forms of property, realty and personalty.8 The South believed that
slavery fell under the latter of these two categories, the criteria being that a slave was chattel, or
moveable property.
However, it was also argued in the South that, due to the expensive nature of purchasing
and owning a slave, it was a more valuable type of property than land or tools. In the well-known
A Treatise on Political Economy, Jean-Baptiste Say argued that “a nation, awake to its true interest,
is careful…to husband its pecuniary bounty, where it is prodigal of distinction and authority.”9 In
this case, the idea of the paternalistic father-figure remained prominent in the South for reasons of
both social and economic stability. The South wished to maintain its social order, while at the
same time ensuring its economic success with the slaves responsible for its “pecuniary bounty.”
According to Genovese, the Antebellum South was made up of a “complementary system
of complementary plantation law.”10 This essentially meant that all authority on the plantation
resided in the master, which complimented both public law and police laws. However, by the
dawn of the Antebellum era, public law also implemented limits on slave abuse and violence on
the part of the master. In essence, this system was accepted as common law, but only up to a point.
The Southern analysis of their own system was that there was no contradiction between owning
an unpaid worker while at the same time, participating in a greater capitalist, trans-Atlantic
marketplace.11 Political economists in the South combined the institution of slavery with their
own analysis of the Southern master class to explain how they believed that planters in the
Southern states were (...truncated)
