Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nmvwc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T14:50:07.421Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - The Legal Rights and Responsibilities of Strangers Toward Slaves, Animals, and Free Persons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2009

Jenny Bourne Wahl
Affiliation:
St Olaf College, Minnesota
Get access

Summary

The threads of slavery ran seamlessly through the fabric of Southern society. Whether they liked it or not, many antebellum Southerners dealt with slaves on a near-daily basis. Many of these dealings triggered controversy. Public officials, slave patrollers, and common-carrier owners and operators constituted a number of the defendants in cases where strangers injured the interests of slaveowners. But disputes with ordinary citizens and business owners came up as well. As the following sections discuss, four major questions arose: (1) What duty of care did strangers have toward slaves, particularly when protecting other types of property? (2) What recourse did slaveowners have against those who kidnapped slaves and what did masters owe to slave catchers? (3) What penalties were appropriate for those who traded and gamed with slaves, sold liquor to slaves, or otherwise undercut the authority of masters? (4) When should defendants avoid liability (and perhaps recover fees) for treating another's slave well?

In these disputes where interested parties could not cheaply have transacted, people asked judges to allocate liability and damages. Here as elsewhere, slave law typically apportioned risks as people would have done themselves, had they been able to do so easily. Slave law accounted for relevant externalities as well. Because drunken, merchant, or fugitive slaves might have stirred up their compatriots or stolen from whites, slave law imposed stiff penalties on those who sold liquor to or bought goods from blacks, and on those who facilitated slave escapes. And slaveowners had to acquiesce to some discipline of slaves by outsiders and some reward for those who captured fugitives or treated slaves with special care.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Bondsman's Burden
An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery
, pp. 120 - 141
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×