3.1: Enslavement in America - Readings and Media

The selected readings, images, and videos of this module will inform students about the Atlantic slave trade and the slave codes.

Readings and Videos

Black Culture Unlocked. "The Atlantic Slave Trade: What Schools Never Told You." YouTube video, 24:21. January 1, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g00elRjygRQ.

Triangular Trade Routes

Triangle trade is a general term for trade involving three linked ports of destination. The most commonly known triangular trade route involved the Atlantic slave trade. During the 18th century, trading ships from New England carried rum and other goods to the west coast of Africa to be exchanged for slaves. The slaves then became the cargo for the voyage to the West Indies (the infamous Middle Passage), where they were exchanged for molasses to be transported back to New England and turned into rum.

"Triangular Trade Routes." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2025, africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/2152533. Accessed 16 Dec. 2025.

Slave Codes

A key component in the complex social and political system governing slavery, slave codes emerged as part of an extensive body of law aimed at regulating the lives and activities of enslaved African Americans in the United States. Slave codes were clear in defining slaves as property without full legal status, and they made slavery a permanent condition that was usually inherited through one's mother. The reach of these codes extended beyond those enslaved, however, given that many also had provisions that regulated free blacks, their movement, their employment, and their options for housing and setting up permanent residence. The reach, breadth, and severity of individual slave codes varied, but all had a vested interest in curtailing slave resistance, policing the everyday lives of those enslaved, and protecting slave owners. Although these codes are commonly associated with southern slave states, they could be found in their northern counterparts as well.

All slave codes shared certain characteristics in terms of the control they attempted to wield over the personal activities of slaves and often free blacks, but individual slave states had their own codes in place that dictated their provisions and informed their court systems. Slaves had very few legal rights in a court of law; their testimony was seldom duly considered in any litigation involving whites and could be dismissed in its entirety. Trials for slaves were occasionally held in taverns or country stores and seldom resulted in parity. Codes banned slaves from owning property, marrying, or entering into contracts. They were also written to exert dominion over the language that slaves spoke and the clothes that they wore. Speaking words considered defamatory meant that one could be arrested, whipped, and/or sold at auction. Manumission, or the freeing of one's slaves, was also restricted through slave codes in many states, in an effort to secure the growth of slavery and restrict the presence of free blacks.

Because slave codes were used largely to act as a form of social control, they were always subject to reformulation if a state felt that they needed to be strengthened in order to further discourage slave rebellions or to supplement already existing laws set out to protect the property and physical well-being of slave owners. Those enslaved were not allowed to assemble freely with one another or engage in communal worship, they could not be taught to read or write or possess literature that was considered inflammatory, and they could not vacate an owner's premises without explicit permission. Codes made it illegal for slaves to own firearms, attend unlawful assemblies, and participate in riots. Thus, the codes not only operated in an attempt to inhibit any form of resistance carried out by an individual person who was enslaved, but also were developed to suppress any semblance of communal gatherings that might lead to wide-scale uprisings or rebellions.

Slave codes and their corresponding punishments made them one of the most violent aspects of slavery. Submission to these codes was enforced through various measures, most of which exerted extreme force over any enslaved person found to act against a given code. Whippings, beatings, and floggings were commonly used forms of punishment, but other codes called for branding, dismemberment, imprisonment, and for males, castration. A 1690 statue in South Carolina, for instance, stated that slaves or runaways who struck a white person would be severely whipped on the first offense, followed by slitting of the nose and burning of a part of one's face with an iron for a second offense. A third offense could include death or any other punishment. In Virginia, robbing or committing any other major offense could be met with 60 lashes, being placed in stocks, and dismemberment. Slave owners, on the other hand, who killed their slaves or other enslaved blacks were usually subject only to fines. Slave codes were frequently enforced by what were known as slave patrols, or groups of usually white men who went around various plantations ensuring slaves were inside of their quarters or otherwise not moving about freely. These patrols are sometimes seen as precursors to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) that flourished following emancipation, given the violence that they inflicted and the presence that they had.

Slave codes were also antecedents to the black codes developed immediately after the Civil War that extended throughout the earliest waves of Reconstruction. Like their predecessors, these later codes were developed to act as an agent of social control in the interest of curbing the social, political, and economic opportunities available to African Americans, who though legally free from bondage, were subject to an ever-increasing number of laws that in many ways attempted to reenact the restrictions and chief aims of slave codes.

Amanda J. Davis

Davis, Amanda J. "Slave Codes." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2025, africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1477872. Accessed 16 Dec. 2025.