Rape of an enslaved person was legally unrecognizable in Mississippi courts.

Evidence

Judge E. G. Henry of Madison County sentenced George to death by hanging. George’s enslaver appealed the decision to the state’s High Court of Errors and Appeals. John D. Freeman, the lawyer representing George, argued that because the victim was enslaved, George had committed no legally recognizable offense. “The crime of rape does not exist in this State between African slaves,” Freeman noted. “Our laws recognize no marital rights as between slaves; their sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners. The regulations of law, as to the white race, on the subject of sexual intercourse, do not and cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to slaves.” The high court agreed and threw out the indictment. “Masters and slaves cannot be governed by the same system of laws; so different are their positions, rights and duties,” the court reasoned. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 216

Categorization

• QUESTION: The court’s reasoning that masters and slaves cannot share one legal system is a clean statement of legal personhood categories — worth comparing to contemporary legal frameworks that grant differential rights.
• XREF: Connects to laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale on how law renders certain bodies without standing, and to how property law erases personhood.
• CANDY: A single stark case — a man sentenced to death for raping a child, then freed because the victim’s enslavement erased the crime.