Afro Little Havana: Commemorating the Black History of the "Latino Ellis Island"

Slave Codes

The history of convict leasing has its roots in slave codes. Planters brought and imported thousands of enslaved Africans to work on plantations in Florida. After East Florida transitioned from a Spanish to British colony in 1763, English lawmakers invented ever-growing lists of slave codes that had no seeming connection to one another except to imagine the slave as potential threat (Morris 1996; Wagner 2009). The idea of the ungovernable slave, argues Wagner (2009, 6):

…looks forward, in the history of the United States, to the beginnings of a systematic jurisprudence on slave status during the decade prior to independence; to the widening of police initiatives against free negroes in the antebellum years; to Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Dred Scott v. Sandford on the fugitive slave’s unlawful standing; to the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause; to Roberts v. City of Boston and Plessy v. Ferguson on segregation and public welfare; to the new police departments, magistrate’s courts, and convict lease operations that were introduced after emancipation.

This page has paths: