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Happy Juneteenth
The Slave Law Made To Protect Rich White Women From Punishment For Killing Mixed-Race Children
Yes, this article will make the white children feel bad.
There were no consensual relationships between enslaved people and their masters. No matter if you claimed the people involved were “in love.” The power imbalance was too significant. There is no way to tell if the relationship contained love or submission. One person owned the other as property, an asset they could do with as they wished.
The Casual Killing Act of 1669 was written to protect rich white women from legal punishment. White women were killing the defenseless mixed-race children of their husbands and enslaved women. The women in Virginia were killing the mixed children in horrific ways. They were angry that their spouses were having plenty of children outside their marriages.
The small children were routinely boiled, skinned, tortured, and beaten to death. The problem was the authorities did not want to chastise the rich White women, not that the children were being killed. After all, child slaves were the property of their families to be done with as they wished.
Poor white women were not killing the children of their husband’s slaves because poor white people rarely owned slaves. If a poor white person somehow owned a female slave, the slave represented a substantial financial asset for the family. No matter how much you did not like that light, brown-skinned baby walking around with your husband’s face, you dared not kill it. A slave could be sold for substantial money to enrich the family.
“The Casual Killing Act of 1669
1669. Virginia passes an act regarding the casual killing of enslaved people: “If any slave resist his master (or other by his master’s order correcting him) and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accompted felony.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Study Aid, Slavery and Seventeenth Century “
Passed on October 20, 1669, The Casual Killing Act of 1669 did the trick. Now, the dead, burned, and tortured bodies of caramel-skinned children could be discarded like any other…
