Would Any Provisions For the Rights of Slaves Inevitably Lead to Emancipation?

In the CSA/Antebellum USA, I mean. For example, if killing/mistreating your slaves was criminalized, would that necessarily lead to emancipation, since after the right to life is established, it would get increasingly more difficult to deny slaves' rights to liberty?
 
Not necessarily of itself, but the mood of the nineteenth century will make it hard not to see that as its ultimate end. Abolitionism and antislavery activism were so widespread it would almost automatically be linked. Which also means it would very likely be resisted by proponents of slavery, even those with no interest in harming their property.
 
It would be harder to stop slaves from running away, especially younger men with no families, since they had little to lose by running away other than their lives.
It was losing their lives or their chains, now they would had nothing to lose but their chains.

Slave power understood this, thats why they were increasingly revoking rights of slaves.
After 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, it gotten to the point they could legally abduct free blacks in the north into slavery.
 
In the CSA/Antebellum USA, I mean. For example, if killing/mistreating your slaves was criminalized, would that necessarily lead to emancipation, since after the right to life is established, it would get increasingly more difficult to deny slaves' rights to liberty?

If in the decades before the ACW, probably. If it's before the emancipation movement really took off, probably not: several countries had had limitations on mistreating your slaves before then, and as far as I know this had never led to outright abolitionism.
 
In the CSA/Antebellum USA, I mean. For example, if killing/mistreating your slaves was criminalized, would that necessarily lead to emancipation, since after the right to life is established, it would get increasingly more difficult to deny slaves' rights to liberty?

It was illegal to kill a slave - although enforcement was spotty and the punishment not particularly harsh (usually just a fine). Likewise, mutilation was illegal but this was not regularly enforced. As slaves generally could not testify in a court of law, finding witnesses could be difficult.
 
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