Slave Codes
The territorial slave code was enacted in 1804, a year after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, under which slaves were banned from the use of firearms, participation in unlawful assemblies, or selling alcohol to other slaves. It also severely punished slaves for participating in riots, insurrections, or offering resistance to their masters. It also provided for the mutilation of slaves for sexual assault upon a white woman; a white man who sexually assaulted a slave woman was charged with trespassing upon her owner's property. The code was retained by the State Constitution of 1820.
An 1825 law, passed by the Missouri State Legislature, declared Blacks as incompetent as witnesses in cases which involved Whites, and testimonies by black witnesses were automatically considered invalid.
In 1847, an ordinance banning the education of Blacks and mulattoes was enacted. Anyone caught teaching a black or mulatto person, slave or free, was to be fined $500 and serve six months in jail.
Read more about this topic: History Of Slavery In Missouri
Famous quotes containing the words slave and/or codes:
“Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once.... Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”MScipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—”a man of color,” as if he were discolored.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... until both employers’ and workers’ groups assume responsibility for chastising their own recalcitrant children, they can vainly bay the moon about “ignorant” and “unfair” public criticism. Moreover, their failure to impose voluntarily upon their own groups codes of decency and honor will result in more and more necessity for government control.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)