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The Overseer's Law
Douglass profiles Austin Gore, the plantation’s overseer, and the killing of an enslaved man named Demby that went entirely unpunished — evidence, in Douglass’s telling, of how completely the law shielded a slaveholder’s violence.
Overseer Austin Gore's methodsThe killing of DembyAbsence of legal consequence for violence against enslaved peopleSlave law as protection for the slaveholder, not the slave