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Punishments were a matter of public or royal law, where the disciplinary power over slaves could be considered more severe than that for domestic servants yet less severe than that for soldiers. Masters could only chain and whip slaves "when they believe that their slaves deserved it" and cannot, at will, torture their slaves, or put them to death.
A metal collar could be put on a slave. Such collars were thick and heavy; they often had protruding spikes that impeded work as well as rest. Louis Cain, a survivor of slavery, described the punishment of a fellow slave: "One nigger run to the woods to be a jungle nigger, but massa cotched him with the dog and took a hot iron and brands him.
Punishment and killing of slaves: Slave codes regulated how slaves could be punished, usually going so far as to apply no penalty for accidentally killing a slave while punishing them. [9] Later laws began to apply restrictions on this, but slave-owners were still rarely punished for killing their slaves. [ 10 ]
His essay entitled, "The Method of Procuring Slaves on the Coast of Africa; with an account of their sufferings on the voyage, and cruel treatment in the West Indies", describes the iron bit as having "a flat iron which goes into the mouth, and so effectually keeps down the tongue, that nothing can be swallowed, not even the saliva, a passage ...
There was legal agitation against slavery in the Thirteen Colonies starting in 1752 by lawyer Benjamin Kent, whose cases were recorded by one of his understudies, the future president John Adams. Kent represented numerous slaves in their attempts to gain their freedom. He handled the case of a slave, Pompey, suing his master. [142]
Colonial America bastardy laws were laws, statutes, or other legal precedents set forth by the English colonies in North America.This page focuses on the rules pertaining to bastardy that became law in the New England colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania from the early seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century.
Senator (and future Chief Justice) Oliver Ellsworth was the drafter of the Crimes Act. The Crimes Act of 1790 (or the Federal Criminal Code of 1790), [1] formally titled An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States, defined some of the first federal crimes in the United States and expanded on the criminal procedure provisions of the Judiciary Act of 1789. [2]
It does not appear that the provisions which prohibited cruel and unusual punishments were widely enforced. However, in at least one notable instance, the trial of Arthur Hodge for the murder of one of his slaves, the Act was cited obliquely. Hodge's counsel, at the bail hearing, had argued that "A Negro being property, it was no greater ...