Slavery

Slavery is an age-old social institution defined by law and custom as the most absolute involuntary form of human servitude. The humiliating practice of slavery dates to prehistoric times, although its institutionalization probably first occurred in early historical times, when advances in agricultural systems made possible more highly organized societies. The infamous Atlantic slave trade, carried out in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, began in Africa in the mid-1400s but did not become a huge enterprise until after European nations began colonizing the Americas during the 1500s. This inhuman practice generated sociopolitical as well as legal concerns. It gave rise to a widespread abolitionist movement. Because of the abolitionist movement, the institution of slavery ceased in Europe and the Americas by 1888, although it was not legally abolished in Africa until the first quarter of the 20th century. Today, nobody denies that modern slavery, whenever it occurred, has been essentially a violent regime.

The unprecedented growth of slavery and the slave trade highlights gross manipulation of underdeveloped juridical systems, which failed to protect basic human dignity. Therefore, scholars recognize law as an important factor in analyzing and understanding slave societies. Legislation, the state, and its agents in fact had an enormous weight in determining how nations experienced slavery. Through these institutions, individuals who either had no formal rights—slaves—or those whose access to rights was barred—freedmen and free blacks—could at least claim and formalize civil status. It is important to emphasize that at the turn of the nineteenth century, social norms and standards were extremely fluid, and legal rules were extraordinarily ill defined. Consequently, despite different legal traditions, [Page 1374]the destinies of discrete groups of Africans and their descendants throughout the Atlantic world were remarkably similar.

With the growing social and political turbulence that characterized the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many slaves perceived that it was high time to claim their personal freedom. The political idea of the individual started to gain more scope and content. By calling into question the established custom and adding another dimension to the relationship between slaves and masters, lawsuits for freedom became an effective means for slaves to promote their emancipation. Some slaves sought manumission and brought lawsuits to win their freedom when negotiations to get manumission resulted in conflicts between them and slaveholders. Between the early 1790s and the early 1820s, many slaves from cities such as Baltimore and Rio de Janeiro acquired their freedom or initiated lawsuits against their masters in which, for various reasons, they argued that they should be freed. The occurrence of these freedom suits also demonstrates that slaves from different places used the courts as a way to fight for their rights.