[249] Stephen, op. cit. i. 369 sq. Stroud, op. cit. pp. 125, 126, 130. Cobb, op. cit. p. 67. Wheeler, Treatise on the Law of Slavery, p. 5.
[250] von Holst, Constitutional and Political History of the United States, i. 305.
Slaves were defined as “chattels personal in the hands of their respective owners or possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns, to all intents and purposes whatsoever.”[251] In the British colonies and the American Slave States they were at all times liable to be sold or otherwise alienated at the will of their masters, as absolutely as cattle, or any other personal effects. They were also liable to be sold by process of law for satisfaction of the debts of a living, or the debts or bequests of a deceased master, at the suit of creditors or legatees. They were transmitted by inheritance or by will to heirs at law or to legatees, and in the distribution of estates they were distributed like other property.[252] No regard was paid to family ties. Except in Louisiana, where children under ten years of age could not be sold separately from their mothers,[253] no law existed to prevent the violent separation of parents from their children or from each other.[254] And what the law did not prevent, the slave-owners did not omit doing; thus Virginia was known as a breeding place out of which the members of one household were sold into every part of the country.[255] All this, however, holds true of the British colonies and Slave States only. In the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies plantation slaves were real estate, attached to the soil they cultivated. They partook therewith of all the restraints upon voluntary alienation to which the possessor of the land was there liable, and they could not be seized or sold by creditors, for satisfaction of the debts of the owner.[256] As regards the sale of members of the same family the Code Noir expressly says, “Ne pourront être saisis et vendus séparément, le mari et la femme, et leurs enfans impubéres, s’ils sont tous sous la puissance du même Maître.”[257] A slave could make no contract; he could not even contract marriage, in the juridical sense of the word. The association which took place among slaves and was called marriage was virtually the same as the Roman contubernium, a relation which had no sanctity and to which no civil rights were attached.[258] The master could whenever he liked separate the “husband” and “wife”; he could, if he pleased, commit “adultery” with the “wife,” and was the absolute owner of all the children born by her. A slave had “no more legal authority over his child than a cow has over her calf.” On the other hand, the common rules of sexual morality were not enforced on the slaves. They were not admonished for incontinence, nor punished for adultery, nor prosecuted for bigamy. Incontinence was rather thought a matter of course in the slave. We are told that even in Puritan New England female slaves in ministers’ and magistrates’ families bore children, black or yellow, without marriage, that no one inquired who their fathers were, and that nothing more was thought of it than of the breeding of sheep or swine. And concerning the “slave-quarters” connected with the plantations the universal testimony was that the sexes were there “herded together promiscuously, like beasts.”[259]
[251] Brevard, Digest of the Public Statute Law of South-Carolina, p. 229. Prince, Digest of the Laws of Georgia, p. 777. In the French Code Noir (Édit du mois de Mars 1685, art. 44, p. 49; Édit donné au mois de Mars 1724, art. 40, p. 305) slaves are declared to be “meubles.”
[252] Stephen, op. cit. i. 62. Stroud, op. cit. p. 84. Goodell, American Slave Code in Theory and Practice, p. 63 sqq.
[253] Peirce, Taylor, and King, Consolidation and Revision of the Statutes of the State [Louisiana], pp. 523, 550 sq.
[254] Stephen, op. cit. i. 62 sq. Stroud, op. cit. p. 82.
[255] Pearson, National Life and Character, p. 210.
[256] Stephen, op. cit. i. 69.
[257] Code Noir, Édit du mois de Mars 1685, art. 47, p. 51; Édit donné au mois de Mars 1724, art. 43, p. 306.