The Laws of Slavery in Texas: Historical Documents and Essays

INTRODUCTION

★ INTRODUCTION Human Chattels The Laws of Slavery in Texas Randolph B. Campbell ★ The institution of African slavery as practiced in the antebellum United Statesdependedontheownershipofhumansaschattels,piecesofmovable personal property. As chattels, slaves remained property for life with no legally prescribedwaytoearntheirfreedom.Theyhadnopropertyrightsthemselvesbut could be bought, sold, mortgaged, hired, bequeathed to heirs, and distributed in estatesettlements.Clearly,thestatusofslavesaspropertydefinedtheinstitution in vital ways for both the enslaved person and the slave owner and is a key to any study of slavery and the law. Property rights in organized societies generally require the protection of law, andEngland, the progenitor ofmost Americanlegalconceptsandpractices,had a long experience with the laws of property. Thomas Jefferson’s list of the natural rights of man—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—came directly, most believe, from John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property.” Historians can only speculate on why Jefferson changed “property” to the “pursuit of happiness”—a cynic might say that the pursuit of property is the pursuit of happiness—but the change certainly did not lessen Americans’ belief in the sanctity of property and the need for laws to protect it. Property rights stood as natural rights protected by an enforceable code of statute and case law. Treating slaves as property, however, presented a serious difficulty to those who wrote and interpreted the law because, unlike any other form of property, slaves were human. A dramatic explanation of this paradox appears in The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron’s novelistic “meditation on history” based on the greatest slave rebellion in the history of the United States. Styron has T. R. Gray, Turner’s court-appointed lawyer, explain to the slave rebel a “few jurisprudential details” concerning the special nature of human chattels. Turner understood the point before Gray began, but the lawyer went forward with his lesson in what he called the “rights of property” anyhow. If a farmer stops his wagon on a hill and its brake fails, Gray said, and the wagon careens down the slope and crashes into a home, killing a child, responsibility lies with the owner: “Because a wagon is an in-an-i-mate chattel. A wagon can’t be held culpable for itsacts.Youcan’tpunishtheoldwagon.”Gray thenturnedto what hecalled“the heart of the matter—which is to say, an-i-mate chattel.” “There are both similarities and differences between animate chattel and a wagon,” he told Turner. “The major and manifest similarity is, of course, that animate chattel is property like a wagon and is regarded as such in the eyes of the law. . . . By the same token, the majorandmanifestdifferenceisthatanimatechattel,unlikeinanimatechattelsuch as a wagon, can commit and may be tried for a felony, the owner being absolved of responsibility in the eyes of the law.” “The point is,” Gray concluded, “that you areanimatechattelandanimatechatteliscapableofcraftandconniveryandwily introduction [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The Laws of Slavery in Texas stealth. You ain’t a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritualvolition.Rememberthatwell.Becausethat’showcomethelawprovides that animatechattellike youcanbetriedforafelony, andthat’s howcomeyou’re goin’ to be tried next Sattidy.”1 Holding slaves responsible for their crimes was only one of numerous ways that statute and case law dealing with slavery recognized the humanity of the enslaved. Some states, although Texas was not among them, outlawed teaching slavestoreadandwrite,skillsthatnootherformofpropertycouldacquire.Also, judgesoften allowed considerations of slaves’ humanity to affect their decisions. This was evident, for example, in a decision rendered by Justice Abner S. LipscomboftheTexasSupremeCourtinHagertyv .Harwell(1856).RebeccaHagerty accusedherhusbandofgivingaslavewomanwithwhomhehadhad“adulterous intercourse” and her two children to his sister after she (the wife) had instituted divorce proceedings. The husband’s action, according to his soon-to-be ex-wife, denied her an equal share of the three slaves as community property. Judge Lipscomb found it only reasonable that the husband “should trust the mother and her children in such cases to the kindness of his own sister rather than leave themtotheinjuredandinfuriatedwife,whowouldpossibly,yeaprobably,inflict severity, cruelty and hardship on them when the offender [the ex-husband] was beyond the reach of her angry passions.” Lipscomb noted, however, that in the divorce settlement, Mrs. Hagerty could receive other slaves of equal value to those that she had failed to win in her legal action.2 The size of the Hagertys’ estate gave him the luxury of making a decision that recognized the humanity of the slaves without depriving their masters of any property value. We can only guess at what the decision would have been if the Hagertys had...