The Problem of Slavery in Christian America: An Ethical-Judicial History of American Slavery and Racism

by Joel McDurmon

From the planters’ perspective, they could eradicate every single aspect of these problems with one simple legal maneuver: jump from English Common Law to Roman Civil Law concepts. While such a leap was absolutely forbidden on English soil, the Crown’s ships and colonies were a different matter. The ships fell under Admiralty Law (a Roman derivative), and colonial soil was left ambiguous. This ambiguity left room for one of the prime turns of tyranny in the story of American slavery and racism: the imposition of the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, meaning, in this context, “the offspring follows the womb.” Whereas before, the status of the child would follow the father, it would now follow the mother. This move broke precedent in more than one way. Not only did it impose a Roman law standard in what should have been a Common Law land, it was also a law that was originally written and imposed upon livestock. If you are looking for origins of the idea that American slavery was “chattel” slavery—ownership of individuals as opposed to a mere labor right—you can certainly see it in this foundational Virginian statute that bereft black slaves of Common Law rights of persons and imposed upon them the actual legal standard of chattel. Worse, the law entailed that some masters would be owners of their own sons merely because of the ethnicity of the mother. Rather than acknowledge their own son as a son, the master would enslave them and own them. Thus, racism had trumped...