The Problem of Slavery in Christian America: An Ethical-Judicial History of American Slavery and Racism

by Joel McDurmon

In the 1669 law, the Assembly made allowance for “the casuall killing of slaves.” The state would acquit any master, or anyone acting on behalf of a master, if “any slave resist” and “by the extremity of the correction should chance to die.” The law codified the presumption that no master would purposefully destroy his own property, and thus no such “casuall killing” could involve malice aforethought. As later developments will make clearer, however, such malice did indeed exist in many cases, especially in cases of regularly resisting or “incorrigible” slaves. Such a law simply created the moral hazard of a legal path to murder for whites over blacks. A master, fed up with a particular slave, could purposefully “correct” a slave to such extremity that he by “chance” died, and there would simply be no recourse for such actions. This would be especially true later when the courts would solidify the rule that blacks could not testify against whites in a court of law. At that point, a master could literally beat a slave to death in front of an entire body of other slaves and get away with it.26