Slave pass explained
In the history of slavery in the United States, a slave pass was a written document granting permission for an enslaved person to move around without escort by an enslaver.
Overview
A typical slave pass was a handwritten document that listed the names of the enslaved and the enslaver, the destination of the slave, and the duration of time for which they had been released. A slave who had been granted a slave pass had to have it on hand "at all times" and show it, on demand, to any white person who asked to see it.[1]
Purpose and social control
One of the rationales for anti-literacy laws outlawing the education of slaves was to prevent the enslaved from forging slave passes.[2] According to historian Ryan Quintana, slave passes were a tool of social control:
This vagueness often annoyed slave patrollers, who would have to cede to the limits of the slave pass in order to avoid violating the property rights of slave owners.
Regulations and penalties
In 1857, De Bow's Review published a copy of the rules that guided the management of a rice plantation in South Carolina; the document referred to slave passes as tickets and stated:
In Alabama, the penalties for forging a slave pass were 39 lashes with a whip if the culprit was a free person, and 50 or 100 lashes for an enslaved person, depending on whether it was a first or second offense.[3] In 1853, the Montgomery and West Point Railroad required "negroes traveling alone" to carry two passes, "showing permission of their owners to pass over the road, one of which passes will be retained by the conductor."[4]
The Rev. Calvin Fairbank wrote to William Lloyd Garrison in 1851 after visiting Louisville, saying:
Economic impact
Granting slave passes could be financially beneficial for enslavers, who could collect unearned income by hiring out their enslaved individuals to other employers. As Moses Grandy explained in his 1844 slave narrative:
Mary Gaffney, interviewed for the WPA Slave Narratives Project, recalled:
See also
References
Sources
- Book: Hadden, Sally E. . Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas . 2001 . Chapter 4. In Times of Tranquility: Everyday Slave Patrols . Cambridge, Massachusetts . Harvard University Press . Harvard Historical Studies No. 138 . 105–136 . 9780674258013 . j.ctv1g809mv . 603622768 . 10.2307/j.ctv1g809mv . en-us .
- Book: Quintana, Ryan A. . Making a slave state: political development in early South Carolina . 2018 . The University of North Carolina Press . 978-1-4696-4106-5 . Chapel Hill.
Further reading
- Book: Browne, Simone . Dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness . 2015 . Duke University Press . 978-0-8223-7530-2 . Durham, North Carolina . 2015012563 . 895338023 .
- Book: Müller, Viola Franziska . Escape to the city: fugitive slaves in the antebellum urban South . 2022 . The University of North Carolina Press . 978-1-4696-7107-9 . Chapel Hill.
- Book: Parenti, Christian . The soft cage: surveillance in America, from slavery to the war on terror . 2003 . BasicBooks . 978-0-465-05484-8 . 52429761 . 2003013330 . New York, NY.
External links
Notes and References
- Book: Rice . Kym S. . World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States . Katz-Hyman . Martha B. . Bloomsbury Publishing USA . 2010 . 978-0-313-34943-0 . 364 . en.
- Web site: Slavery, institutional racism, and the development of state surveillance as a response to resistance . 29 July 2014 . Privacy SOS . ACLU of Massachusetts .
- Web site: Slavery has a long reach in our nation's history . Selma Times Journal . 6 July 2016 . 19 June 2024 . 9 December 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20221209223229/https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2016/07/05/slavery-has-a-long-reach-in-our-nations-history/ . live .
- News: 1853-08-31 . Montgomery and West Point R. R. . 2024-06-21 . The Weekly Advertiser . 3.
