household goods, horses, cows, oxen, and hogs.[1] It was not infrequent for Virginian testators to leave instructions in their wills that certain negroes should be sold for the payment of their debts, directions that had their motive probably in the greater readiness with which this form of personal property could be disposed of with little danger of sacrifice.[2] Under the provisions of the revised code of 1705, which is of importance in our inquiry from the light it throws on public feeling in the seventeenth century, the slave was declared to be real estate unless he was still held by a merchant who was seeking to sell him, in which case he was decided to be personalty. His legal status was highly anomalous under this modification of the original law, which had provided that he should be held to be personalty under all circumstances. Although a form of real estate by the code of 1705, he was nevertheless liable to be sold for the payment of debts, but no record was required to be made of such a sale, a step that was essential in the case of land. If unlawfully carried off, he was recoverable by an action of trover as if he constituted one branch of personal property. He could not be made, like ordinary real estate, the basis of a claim to all the privileges of a freeholder.[3]
The rule was in operation in Virginia from an early date, that the child should follow the condition of the mother, which was the adoption of the English provision, partus sequitur ventrem.[4] The necessity of deciding as to
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. II, p. 288; Records of Henrico County, vol. 1688-1697, p. 457, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Records of Lower Norfolk County, original vol., 1666-1675, pp. 68, 106.
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. III, pp. 333, 334.
- ↑ Beverley’s History of Virginia, p. 219. See, also, Green’s Short History of the English People, illustrated, vol. I, p. 28. See, however, the discussion of the relation of Status to Nativity in Vinogradoff’s Villainage in England.
