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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 24. Inequality of Justice - 3. The Southern Heritage
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532 An American Dilemma
status, and since the assumption was upheld that they all shared the respon-
sibility of keeping the Negroes in a lower status, they were given much
the same unrestricted powers against the Negroes as the master, except in
so far as these powers clashed with his property interests. A slave was not
allowed to defend himself against any white man and if the slave were
killed, it was considered as a property damage rather than murder and
could be absolved by paying a fine.^^
In this legal system,which was an outgrowth of slavery as an institution,
the emergence of the free Negroes introduced an obvious anomaly which
became more striking as slavery came more and more to be founded upon
racial beliefs.® Under the constant fear of slave insurrection,^® not only
were restricting regulations of slave behavior continually elaborated, but
the liberties and rights of free Negroes were severely limited.^® This
development is of particular importance for the legal status of the freed-
men after Emancipation, as the nearest analogy was the ante-bellum status
of free Negroes. Another tradition important for the future development
was the function of the police. The police system in the South to a great
extent served the explicit purpose of supervising Negro slaves and free
Negroes and of hindering the former from escape. They were given the
widest license to seize, whip and punish Negroes and generally to act as
the agents of the masters. The police in the South were, by tradition,
watchdogs of all Negroes, slave or free, criminal or innocent.
The psychic pressure upon white society of the slavery system and of
the various devices necessary to uphold it against rebellious Negroes,
envious poor whites, Northern Abolitionists, and world opinion, must have
been intense. The South remained an unstable frontier civilization,^ where
the law was distant and wavering and human life was cheap. ‘T^ynch law
is essentially a fruit of frontier conditions with population sparse, officials
few, amateurish, and easy-going, and legal machinery consequently inade-
quate,” remarks Schrieke, and continues: ^‘That it prevailed in the ante-
bellum South to a degree comparable at all to that in the mining camps
was doubtless due to the thinness of settlement and the occasional hysteria
over rapes and rumors of revolts by Negroes.”^® But, in addition, the
slavery system itself—^and more particularly the right it gave and the
custom it nurtured to punish bodily other adult human beings—must have
conditioned people to violent and arbitrary behavior patterns. Probably
more whites than Negroes were killed in the South during the three
decades following Andrew Jackson’s first administration, which generally
is recognized as marking a beginning of increased tension and spreading
violence in the South.®^ The Negro slaves had a protection, which the
white men did not have, in their value as property.^^
• Sec Chapter 4.
^ See Chapter ao.
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