Chapter 1: Slave Codes and the Origins of Racialized Labor (17th–19th Centuries)
American white supremacy was built on laws that tied race to labor status from the very start. In the 1600s, as English colonies grew dependent on enslaved African labor, their legislatures crafted slave codes to codify Black people’s permanent subjugation. One of the earliest and most chilling examples is Virginia’s Casual Killing Act of 1669, which explicitly authorized enslavers to kill enslaved people who resisted. The law removed any felony penalty for such killings, on the rationale that an owner could not be guilty of murdering his own property. The assembly even claimed that some enslaved individuals were so “obstinate” that violent “correction” was the only way to control them.
Virginia doubled down in 1723 by eliminating all penalties for killing an enslaved person “in the course of correction,” meaning a slave could be beaten to death for the most trivial of offenses (like picking too little cotton or tobacco) without legal consequence. Although willfully murdering a slave was technically still a crime on paper, this too was largely unenforceable—any claim that the victim had “provoked” the violence could excuse the killing. The practical result was that enslavers enjoyed almost total impunity for the abuse or death of Black people under their control. Not surprisingly, throughout the two centuries of chattel slavery in America, prosecutions of white masters for murdering enslaved people were exceedingly rare.
Slave codes varied by colony (and later by state), but all served a common purpose: to embed racial slavery into the legal and social fabric. Virginia’s comprehensive Slave Code of 1705 exemplified this. It declared that all non-Christian servants imported to the colony would be slaves for life, and it strictly segregated Black enslaved people from white colonists. Among its many provisions, the 1705 code prohibited people of African descent from owning firearms or property, from congregating in groups, and from testifying against whites in court. By reducing Black human beings to property and denying them personhood under the law, these codes attempted to prevent any challenge to the plantation labor regime. They also aimed to divide poor whites from enslaved Blacks by formalizing racial hierarchy, especially after events like Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) had shown the elite that multiracial alliances among the underclasses were a threat. In short, early American labor law was racial law: it defined who could be exploited and how.
By the late 18th and early 19th century, even as northern states gradually abolished slavery, the Southern slave economy was further entrenched. The U.S. Constitution itself protected slavery—requiring the return of fugitive slaves and counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for congressional representation—illustrating how deeply Black bondage was interwoven with governance. In this period, the vast majority of African Americans were enslaved agricultural laborers with no rights. Free Black people (the relatively few not enslaved) also faced harsh restrictions: they needed special papers to travel, could be kidnapped into slavery due to pro forma “slave catchers,” and were generally barred from skilled trades or professional work by racist customs and laws.
It’s worth noting that early American labor struggles among white workers—such as artisans organizing for better wages in the North—largely excluded Black labor. The first trade unions emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but they were almost exclusively white. In fact, white journeymen often saw enslaved and free Black workers as unfair competition and agitated for their exclusion. Thus, from the outset, the labor movement in America carried the stain of racism, often prioritizing white workers’ interests at the expense of people of color. This would create deep schisms in the working class that endured well into the 20th century.
By the eve of the Civil War (1861), the legal framework of labor in the South was wholly racialized: four million Black people were enslaved, largely illiterate by law (teaching an enslaved person to read was often a crime), and subjected to unpaid forced labor from cradle to grave. Slave codes had by then developed elaborate controls—curfews, passes, patrollers—all to maximize the extraction of labor and minimize the chance of rebellion. That system was backed by brutal violence (whippings, mutilations, family separations) and by everyday terror. Yet, enslaved African Americans resisted in countless ways, from subtle sabotage and flight to organized revolts. Their resistance, combined with the national crisis over slavery, culminated in the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery in 1865. However, as the next section shows, ending slavery on paper was far easier than uprooting the deep-seated racial hierarchy in American labor. Southern elites quickly found new ways to reinscribe forced labor—this time under the guise of law and order.
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