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The Importance Of Slave Rights In America

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Belittled to a point where they were considered property, slaves possessed essentially no rights in the cruel world of the antebellum South. Prohibited from exercising numerous basic freedoms, slaves lacked the simple liberty of citizenship of the country in which they lived. The enforcement of harsh laws, such as the master's ability to kill their slaves, required colored people to endure substantial oppression. Mulatto children born to parents of two different statuses would assume the ranking of their mother, which justified masters’ practice of raping the enslaved women.Not being allowed to make a will especially enforced the fact that they were property in which everything they owned actually belonged to their owners (“Laws Pertaining to Slavery”). Even their basic right of marriage was stripped by their enslavement in which “marriages … were not considered legally binding” (“Slave Life and Slave Codes”). Any slave that deliberately set fire to a building, raped a white woman, or schemed a rebellion found themselves facing the punishment of death. As if slaves were not forbidden from enough, they were also prohibited from fundamental privileges, including an education, the right to assemble in the absence of a white person, and the possession of a gun. (“Slave Life and Slave Codes”). Colored people were viewed as such incapable human beings by Americans that the rights they so clearly deserved were invisible to their owners. Basic rights that white people took for

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