And the Dred Scott decision, while certainly bad enough, did not say that blacks are not people; it said that blacks (even blacks who had been manumitted in accordance with established legal procedures, or whose ancestors had been thus freed) were not and could not be citizens.
Partly it seems very strange to us now to say that a person is also “property”, but the essence of slavery is declaring that some people are nonetheless owned by other people.
I’m not so sure about that. Slaves were commonly used in brothels, for instance. And on p70 of the book is the line, ‘It is an occupational hazard that you will get some of your slave girls pregnant’ and in the commentary on p76 Mary Beard writes ‘There is plenty of evidence for the sexual abuse of slaves’ and ‘Unwanted slave pregnancies were sufficiently common to joke about…’.
Quite a lengthy document on the rules of citizenship, slavery and the number of combinations of situations where someone gains or inherits slavery, freedom, or citizenship.
Ah, that’s referring to a marriage between citizen and slave, not a mating, isn’t it?
yes, I went through a number of the laws and saw I think only one that referred to an illegitimate child, but not from a slave. A lot of “what if A is a citizen, B is a foreigner/freed slave/Latinum, etc.”