Article by Paul Finkelman
This Article primarily explores race and crime from the time when slavery was evolving to after it had become rooted in American life. Many of the statutes and cases I examine deal with slaves. Obviously slavery was not merely a system of race relations and prejudice; it was also an institution devoted to social control, class stratification, and economic exploitation. The desire of colonial landowners to exploit the labor of indentured servants for their own profit and the obvious differences between whites and blacks combined to create slavery. Cultural and racial difference allowed white planters to turn their African servants into African slaves. Economics provided the incentive for this development and, thus, many regulations of slaves make sense on purely economic grounds. Others are prudential and common to all slave cultures. Slavery everywhere required force to make some people work for others. Nevertheless, slavery in America was racially based and the regulation of slaves was, in the end, the regulation of race. Moreover, it is clear that, at least in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglo-American world, some punishments were meted out to slaves at least in part because they were black. Thus, in examining the history of how “color” became associated with crime, it is important to recognize that the court decisions and laws of early America were a convergence of two complementary themes: economics and race.
About the Author
Paul Finkelman. Associate Professor of History, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. B.A., 1971, Syracuse University; M.A., 1972, Ph.D., 1976, University of Chicago; Fellow in Law and History, 1982-83, Harvard Law School.
Citation
67 Tul. L. Rev. 2063 (1993)