I have some kind of morbid questions about the legalities of slavery in pre-civil-war America, say, 1850.
(1) Was it legal for people other than “blacks” to be enslaved? Could you have slaves whose appearance to the modern eye would be Chinese? Indian (either kind)? Latino?
(2) I’m familiar with the “one drop” rule, but were there ever cases where an already-light-skinned black female slave had a baby through miscegenation that was so clearly pink-skinned that everyone just said “well, that’s a white baby there”. Assuming that the law did not provide for just immediately declaring such a person free, what would happen to him/her later in life? Would they have either higher or lower status than other slaves?
(3) Under any circumstances, was it legal to enslave people who were not already enslaved? Suppose I were a plantation owner and I was hiking through the forest and came upon an isolated cabin in the woods in which lived a black family, who clearly had no contact with the outside world and presumably no “papers”. Could I (presumably backed up by men with guns) just say “you are my slaves now”? If I legally couldn’t do so but did so illegally, what would stop me from getting away with it?
There was something akin to slavery called “indentured servitude.” It was a form of debt bondage. It was a way to get free passage to the colonies. You’d work for a set period, essentially as a slave, then have your freedom at the end of the term. I recall hearing seven years as the typical term, but I suppose the periods could vary. Not sure when it died out.
There is a film out now called 12 Years a Slave about a free black man from New York who traveled to Washington DC, was kidnapped and sold into slavery. It’s a true story.
No idea if the criterion was “Negro” or “not White”; I’d like to know too.
The novel “Puddin’head Wilson” by Mark Twain postulates that a 1/16 black mulatto woman could switch her 1/32 black infant with her master’s newborn baby, who was raised as a slave and no one would be the wiser. A fictional example but I’ve never heard that anyone ever considered the premise implausible.
3.When Florida was still a Spanish territory, runaway slaves who made it there were harbored by the native Seminoles. During the Seminole Wars, captured blacks who had been born free were summarily enslaved. In one infamous case involving the Fugitive Slave Act, a slave owner trying to reclaim a black woman he said had escaped as a child claimed her children as his property too. And during the American Civil War when Confederate forces invaded Pennsylvania, a number of free black citizens were carried off into slavery. In general, any black who wasn’t considered manumitted under Southern law was fair game.
Interesting questions. Is there any information about the exact legal process that made one a slave to begin with? Clearly, a lot of what went on was de facto and it was more the case of the law conforming to social realities (these people over there are slaves), but there must have been some fundamental legal theory that would have been studied by lawyers. Are there any surviving antebellum law review articles or law school textbooks that cover the legal theory behind slavery and consider hypothetical cases?
The people who ended up enslaved in the US were mostly kidnapped from Africa or were the descendants of people kidnapped from Africa. Was there something special about Africa that made it ripe picking grounds for enslavement?
If you kidnapped a (white) Swedish Lutheran missionary to Mali at gunpoint, did you have any legal basis to say that since he was captured in Africa, he is now a slave? Of course, genteel Southern society would not allow you to do this in practice, but what about theory?
If you bumped into (black) Ethiopian overseas traders trying to sell their wares in Nagasaki, could you up and enslave them at gunpoint and have this recognized under US or British law since they were black, even though you kidnapped the slaves in Japan? While you were there, could you kidnap a few random Japanese people as your slaves too and expect a Virginia court to go along with you?
In general, you were either born a slave (from slave parents) or were captured in Africa and made into a slave.
Africa was the source partly because tribes in Africa still routinely captured neighboring tribes and made them slaves. I suppose it was originally a local thing, but once the white slave traders came around, they saw a way to make money from their captives and went about capturing more.
Note that the Africans traders always sold to the European/American traders. There were virtually no African traders outside of Africa; their economy was based upon selling the slaves (though they may have kept some for themselves). There was no reason to try to take them elsewhere, especially since they probably knew it was easy to end up enslaved themselves.
The theory was that Blacks were an inferior race. A Swede in Mali would clearly not be a part of that race, and thus wouldn’t be enslaved. If he were captured by the local slave traders, the white slave traders would refuse to buy him and probably insist he be released.
There weren’t a lot of laws governing this in Africa, since they didn’t really have a written legal system; most was still done by custom and whim. You became a slave in Africa because a local slave trader captured you and sold you to the white slave traders. There really was only law governing it when they got to America – and they were declared slaves as they got there (until the slave trade was banned, at which point, they would be smuggled in and put to work on a plantation, and the records altered to indicate they were born in the US).
Basically, slavery didn’t really care that much about the niceties of legality unless a slave tried to escape.
Seven years was typical for someone voluntarily entering into the arrangement, but indentured servitude was handed out as a legal punishment as well, for terms up to life.
My spouse’s first European ancestor to arrive in the North American colonies had been sentenced to indentured servitude for life, making him essentially a white slave (he’d supported the losing side in the Bonnie Prince Charlie rebellion). He got out of it, sort of, by running off into the woods and joining up with the Cherokee, which is how so much Native blood entered in that side of the family.
This encapsulates the idiocy of the “one drop” rule. Roxana is considered to be a “black mulatto” instead of what she actually is - a white woman with a small fraction of black ancestry.
There was a minor controversy in 1984 when a movie production of the novel cast a white actress, Lise Hilboldt, in the role of Roxana. Some people felt that the role should have been given to a black actress. But the producers argued (and I agree) that it was both more accurate to the story and it made a dramatic point for the audience to see a white woman in the role of a slave.
This was one of the big arguments opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act made against it. The law was designed to foster abuse. Free black people could be captured in northern states on the flimsiest of evidence and brought down to a slave state where a local court would decide if they were a fugitive slave or not (and where the accused was legally prohibited from presenting any evidence in his defense). In addition to the pervasive social attitude against black people, there was the financial incentive that a judge got paid more for pronouncing a black person was a slave than he did if he pronounced him free. So an unknown number of black people who were legally free were enslaved under this law.
And then there was the famous case of the Cuban slave ship Amistad. When the ship eventually arrived in a non-slave northern port, it was argued that the slaves should be tried for high seas piracy, for having seized the ship. But eventually the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a decision that the slaves had been illegally kidnapped in violation of American, British and Spanish laws banning the slave trade, and that therefore they were free men who had taken lawful action to escape captivity.
This was also pretty common for early black slaves as well, including that while it could be lifelong, it frequently wasn’t. That happened later. And even the “one-drop” rule wasn’t formally or clearly expressed until much later. The racial element of slavery didn’t really becoming that prominent until the 18-teens, although most slaves were black even before then.
It would have been legal. A few AmerIndians may have been enslaved - it’s hard to tell (some definitely were in LatinAmerica although it was uncommon). As far as I know, however, it just never happened.
Well, I don’t know how anyone would have specifically stopped it, but it wouldn’t have been legal. Enslavement on American territory AFAIK never happened. Slaveowners either bought from Africa (legalities aside, they considered themselves to be buying people who were already slaves) or owned descendants of earlier slaves. Enslavement wasn’t a legal penalty for black criminals, although I understand that at times that effectively happened as well. Occasional kidnappings definitely occurred, but apparently were not an everyday fear, but common enough that New York (& I think others) actually provided some legal remedies to claw back citizens kidnapped into slavery.
Until fairly close to the Civil War when the Dred Scott decision came down, slaves who lived even briefly in free states were commonly freed (including under the laws of Southern states). Likewise, the affidavits of trustworthy citizens would likely have sufficed to ensure freedom against bondage. A key element in Solomon Northrup’s history was that one he got word to his family, they were able to quickly get backing and an agent was sent to reclaim Northrup. Which he did. Interestingly, I can’t find reliable records on any incidents on Southern blacks being taken into slavery. This may be due to paucity of account, or alternatively it’s quite probable that anyone willing to do this would prefer to “hunt” well away from the locations they’d be selling the slaves.
The “one drop rule” has always been exaggerated. The fact is there was no DNA testing during that rules prominence, so essentially it was really an eye test more so. If you could pass as white you could essentially live as a white person and some “african-americans” actually did. It’s called “passing” and was more common then people today would probably believe. These “former blacks” often married whites and started families.
There have been some news stories the last few years of white americans discovering they have black ancestry from an ancestor who chose to pass as white back in the day.
True, but this was possible only if the individual could get away and start a new identity. Mostly it worked to their detriment because everybody would know the ancestry back for generations and the presence of a single black ancestor was enough to justify the slavery regardless of skin tone. That was the real meaning of “one drop”. One drop was sufficient for ownership and all that implied.
I’m not sure how much of this continued after American independence, although most states changed their internal laws only slightly from colonial days. Most Indians were driven out of prime areas for slave-holding in the early 19th century. It’s somewhat ironic that Indians could and did own black slaves of their own, as the Cherokees in Florida did until they outlawed slavery in 1827.
Muslim ( Arab ) slavers worked the continent from the east side from the 7th to 20th centuries, taking maybe 15 million natives ( excluding european slaves caught in Europe and Asia of course ): whilst when we think of Arab Slave trade in Africa we immediately think of the notorious hunting parties raiding through the bush, no doubt many were bought from other natives on the ready-to-use plan.
However they did not breed the men.
Almost all of them were. And almost none of them were just randomly captured by white guys. It wasn’t necessary, and in any event would have been impractical and expensive. And in general, most Europeans of the day had an odd attitude towards slavery. Buying and employing slaves for your own whims was one thing - but actually clapping another human being in irons was slightly beyond the pale. I suppose it’s an attitude based on emotional distance. To be fair, it’s also true a lot of these slaves would have been executed otherwise.
In any case, the great slave ports were in fact run by local kingdoms for their own benefit. And it had been going on the northeastern side of Africa for much longer as posters mentioned.
In the book “Though the Heavens May Fall”, about the Somersett case, there is also a case mentioned in which a man was released, after a habeas corpus hearing, on the grounds that he wasn’t a slave, just a man kidnapped from the coast of Africa, sold in Cuba and then brought to England as a slave. Not until 1774 and the Somersett case itself was slavery declared not legal in England and other common-law jurisdictions.
Although slave **trading **was made illegal in the UK in the 19th century, holding a person in slavery did not become in the UK until 6 April 2010. Nineteenth-century legislation made slavery illegal, in stages, throughout the British Empire, but the status of slave had never existed under English common law. Therefore, since slaves did not legally exist in this country, holding a slave was never made specifically illegal – until then.
Which is not at all what the OP is asking, since he did have papers.
As for the OP, and this is really pre-Civil War, not applicable in the years (decades) immediately before the civil war, you were a slave if your mother was a slave (at least in some colonies). In fact, Wanda Sykes is descendent from a white mixed race woman in the 1600s who was declared free because her mother was white (although an indentured servant) and her father was black. Her descendants remained free all through the 1700s and 1800s and right through the Civil War.
As others have noted, the “one drop rule” was not about appearances, but known ancestry. As for your last sentence, you might refer to the wikipedia article on “high yellow”. Although the term was mostly used post-Civil War, there is certainly evidence that light skin tone and known white ancestry could get you a higher status as a slave in pre-Civil War times.
Of course (warning, speculation here), it probably was a case that sometimes light skin (and familial resemblance) would get you sold away from the plantation in order to avoid embarrassment to the master.
