Slave codes stripped enslaved people of legal standing, kinship, and bodily protection.

Evidence

The laws, known as slave codes, varied from colony to colony, state to state, and over time. Some prohibited enslaved people from legally marrying; others prevented them from learning to read or from meeting privately in groups. Enslaved people had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold, or traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle, or behind storefronts that advertised NEGROES FOR SALE. Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, the enslaved held no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their “property” without legal consequence. In the eyes of the law, enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing, and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, including those working for Jefferson. They could be worked to death, and often were, to produce exorbitant profits for the white people who owned them. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 90

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the counterfactual of Hacker’s ‘Two Nations’ and to the ‘Slavery and the Making of America’ thesis about law as infrastructure.