Custom Search
Word for the Day -- SLAVE
SLAVE. A man who is by law deprived of his liberty for life, and becomes the property of another.
2. A slave has no political rights, and generally has no civil rights. He can enter into no contract unless specially authorized by law; what he acquires generally, belongs to his master. The children of female slaves follow the condition of their mothers, and are themselves slaves.
3. In Maryland, Missouri and Virginia slaves are declared by statute to be personal estate, or treated as such. Anth. Shep. To. 428, 494; Misso. Laws, 558. In Kentucky, the rule is different, and they are considered real estate. 1 Kty. Rev. Laws, 566 1 Dana's R. 94.
4. In general a slave is considered a thing and not a person; but sometimes he is considered as a person; as when he commits a crime; for example, two white persons and a slave can commit a riot. 1 McCord, 534. See Person.
5. A slave may acquire his freedom in various ways: 1. By manumission, by deed or writing, which must be made according to the laws of the state where the master then acts. 1 Penn. 10; 1 Rand. 15. The deed may be absolute which gives immediate freedom to the slave, or conditional giving him immediate freedom, and reserving a right of service for a time to come; 6 Rand. 652; or giving him his freedom as soon as a certain condition shall have been fulfilled. 2 Root, 364; Coxe, 4. 2. By manumission by will. When there is an express emancipation by will, the slave will be free, and the testator's real estate shall be charged with the payment of his debts, if there be not enough personal property without the sale of the slaves. 9 Pet. 461. See Harper, R. 20. The manumission by will may be implied, as, where the master devises property real or personal to his slave. 2 Pet; 670; 5 Har. & J. 190. 3. By the removal of the slave with the consent of the master, animo morandi, into one of the United States where slavery is forbidden by law; 2 Mart. Lo. Rep. N. J. 401; or when he sojourns there longer than is allowed by the law of the state. 7 S. & R. 378; 1 Wash. C. C. Rep. 499. Vide Stroud on Slavery; Bouv. Inst. Index, h. t.; and as to the rights of one who, being free, is held as a slave, 2 Gilman, 1; 3 Yeates, 240.
MANUMISSION, contracts. The agreement by which the owner or master of a slave sets him free and at liberty; the written instrument which contains this agreement is also called a manumission.
2. In the civil law it was different from emancipation, which, properly speaking, was applied to the liberation of children from paternal power. Inst. liv. 1, t. 5 & 12; Co. Litt. 137, a; Dane's Ab. h. t.
TESTATOR. One who has made a testament or will.
TESTATOR. One who has made a testament or will.
2. In general, all persons may be testators. But to this rule there are various exceptions. First, persons who are deprived of understanding cannot make wills; idiots, lunatics and infants, are among this class. Secondly, persons who have understanding, but being under the power of others, cannot freely exercise their will; and this the law presumes to be the case with a married woman, and, therefore, she cannot make a will without the express consent of her husband to the particular will. When a woman makes a will under some general agreement on the part of the husband that she shall make a will, the instrument is not properly a will, but a writing in the nature of a will or testament. Thirdly, persons who are deprived of their free will cannot make a testament; as, a person in duress. 2 Bl. Com. 497; 2 Bouv. Inst. n. 2102, et seq. See Devisor; Duress; Feme covert;, Idiot; Influence; Parties to Contracts; Testament; Wife; Will.
Laws of manumission varied widely from society to society and within societies across time. They are often viewed as the litmus test of a particular society’s views of the slave, that is, of the capacities the slave was likely to exhibit as a free human being. Many Islāmic societies, broadly interpreting the Hebrew prescription, generally prescribed that slave owners had to free their slaves after the passage of a number of years, essentially the length of time they considered it took for an “outsider” to become an “insider.” Most other societies allowed masters to free their slaves whenever they wished, although there were exceptions. Some legal systems prescribed manumission when the slave adopted the religion of his owner. It is hardly surprising that manumission was more frequent in systems of household slavery, for intimate relations between master and slave soon converted the outsider into an insider. With notable exceptions, such as Athens,, Rome, Muscovy, and some circum-Caribbean societies, many societies required manumission after three generations.
Birth was occasionally a route to manumission. In thriving slave systems such as those of the New World, in harsh systems such as those among the Northwest Coast Indians and the medieval Germanic peoples, or even in milder systems such as those of the Chinese and the Muscovites, a slave’s offspring simply added to the slave population. But that was not universally the case; African slave societies, such as the Dahomeans of West Africa, the Ashanti of Ghana, or the Azande living between the Congo and the Nile, prescribed that the offspring of slaves should be free, as part of the process of incorporation into a new lineage. Although Islāmic law did not require manumission upon birth, the Qurʿān recommended it, and slave owners were often inclined to follow the religious tenet. The Aztecs freed all children born in slavery except the offspring of traitors. In Thailand emancipation was considered a pious act, and at their death many owners freed their slaves.
The rate of manumission did not necessarily correspond to the legal ease of manumission. It should be noted, however, that in Rome manumission was relatively easy and was widely practiced, even though there was a 5 percent tax on manumission in the Republic, and the Lex Fufia Caninia of 2 bc forbade manumission by testament of more than a fifth to a half of one’s slaves, depending on the number owned. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, manumission was common in most periods, and the freed person typically became a kind of relative in a process of assimilation. In Neo-Babylonia, in Late and Middle Assyria, and in Muscovy manumission was easy but rare; in the American South manumission was comparatively difficult and almost never happened after the prohibition on importing new slaves. The factors of institutional dynamism, expansionism, and profitability, as well as race (see below), may have been the most crucial variants for the South, where manumission was even forbidden in South Carolina in 1820, Mississippi in 1822, Arkansas in 1858, and Maryland and Alabama in 1860; other factors were at work in the ancient Middle East and Muscovy.
There was considerable variation among societies as to whether a slave was allowed to accumulate property that he might keep after manumission. One form of such accumulation was the Roman peculium, which legally belonged to the master. One of its heirs was called coartación, the self-purchase system, widely used 1,500 years later in Latin America.
After manumission, most societies prescribed a period of legal transition to freedom. In the Roman Empire, China, and elsewhere, this period took three generations and might mean that the grandchild of a slave owner (the “patron”) was legally responsible for the grandchild of a slave (his “client”). Thereafter the descendants of the freedman became full members of society, although perhaps still despised. The reason for the legally mandated period of transition to freedom was clear: the slave initially was not a member of the society but an outsider (see below), and it took time to become integrated into the new society. Equally important, the slave was dependent on his owner, and it took time for the freedman and his heirs to become fully self-reliant members of society. If the slave owner and his heirs were not responsible for the freedmen, the fear was, as expressed in the Louisiana Slave Code of 1824, that the latter might otherwise become public wards.
Slave culture
The institution of slavery usually tried to deny its victims their native cultural identity. Torn out of their own cultural milieus, they were expected to abandon their heritage and to adopt at least part of their enslavers’ culture. Nonetheless, studies have shown that there were aspects of slave culture that differed from the master culture. Some of these have been interpreted as a form of resistance to oppression, while other aspects were clearly survivals of a native culture in the new society. Most of what is known about this topic comes from the circum-Caribbean world, but analogous developments may have occurred wherever alien slaves were concentrated in numbers sufficient to prevent their complete absorption by the host slave-owning or slave society. Thus slave culture was probably very different on large plantations from what it was on small farms or in urban households, where slave culture (and especially Creole slave culture) could hardly have avoided being very similar to the master culture. Slave cultures grew up within the perimeters of the masters’ monopoly of power but separate from the masters’ institutions.
Religion, which performed the multiple function of explanation, prediction, control, and communion, seems to have been a particularly fruitful area for the creation of slave culture. Africans perceived all misfortunes, including enslavement, as the result of sorcery, and their religious practices and beliefs, which were often millennial, were formulated as a way of coping
From: Rod Remelin rremelin@dcwisp.net