“The Penalty of a Tyrant's Law”: Slavery and Crime in the Nineteenth Century American South

Nineteenth-century Americans held diverse views about the relationship between slavery and crime that were informed by personal experiences of the system of human bondage and political, religious and moral beliefs about race, justice and abolition. Interpretations of crime were central to the arguments of proslavery ideologues and abolitionists alike and few on either side of the sectional divide doubted that slavery influenced practices and cultures of crime, policing and punishment in profound and far-reaching ways. Crime had different meanings for the enslaved themselves. Living under what the abolitionist and escaped slave Henry Bibb called the “tyrant’s law,” enslaved women, men and children were subject to multiple and malleable definitions of crime that were dictated and enforced by enslavers, as well as by statutes and the courts. Criminal law was designed to serve slaveholders’ interests and deeply influenced by slaves’ status as human property, but it was never uncontested. Through an analysis of slaveholder violence, slave resistance, policing and criminal trials, this chapter shows that not only abolitionists but also the enslaved themselves had distinct perspectives on what was criminal and why it mattered, and even among southern slaveholders and judges there were disagreements on questions of criminal justice policy and practice that were evidence of tensions and fissures in the slave regime even if they rarely afforded relief to the enslaved themselves.