Origins and History of Chattel Slavery Explained

Introduction to Chattel Slavery

Traditional slavery, commonly referred to as chattel slavery, is almost certainly the least common among all forms of traditional slavery. According to the American Anti-Slavery Group, in Mauritania — where a legal ban on slavery was placed in 1980 — approximately 90,000 dark-skinned Africans were still owned by Muslim Berber communities. Though Mauritanian Africans had been Muslim for over 100 years, and the Qur'an prohibits the enslaving of fellow Muslims, race in Mauritania appears to be a more influential factor than religious doctrine. The primary uses of such chattel slaves were for sex, labor, and breeding, and they were often exchanged for trucks, guns, camels, and money. The offspring of these chattel slaves remained owned by their masters. Even among communities of freed slaves, tribute was typically paid to former masters, who also maintained some inheritance rights over their freed slaves' property (Singh, n.d).

In Sudan, slavery has been reintegrated into society following a war that ravaged the country for over 12 years. The Muslim north has been fighting the southern Christians and Animists. In Arabic, Sudan simply means "Land of the Black Africans," and for several centuries, black Africans have faced abduction by Arabian slave traders. According to Anti-Slavery Group researchers, there has been a revival of racially-based slave trading, in which armed northern rebel groups raid southern civilian communities in search of slaves. Reports submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights have emphasized the racial dimension of these acts: the victims are exclusively members of indigenous tribes from the Nuba Mountains — dark-skinned Africans. Arab militias, armed by the government, are known for killing men and enslaving women and children as personal possessions, or marching them north to be sold or auctioned off (Singh, n.d).

Events Promoting the Ideological Foundation of Chattel Slavery

Two distinct events that took place in the Caribbean and in British-occupied American territories must be recognized as contributing factors in the conceptual development of chattel slavery. The first event took place in Barbados, and the second in South Carolina. It is noteworthy that slavery had been instituted in Barbados as early as 1636, but it took colonists approximately 30 years to establish a formal legal foundation. The Barbadian Slave Code of 1661 was the first legal codification of slavery for the British in the Caribbean. It was adopted by South Carolina in 1696 and introduced the fundamental rules governing British American slavery. Ten years before this adoption, in 1686, South Carolina had already established a slave's position as a freehold possession, meaning such a person was treated as personal property and could not be transferred to another estate or sold independently. This concept bears resemblance to "serfdom" as practiced during the medieval period in Europe.

Once the ideas of the Barbadian slave system had been adopted by South Carolina, Africans were effectively reduced to the status of chattel, granting slave masters total control and ownership. The South Carolina legal system stipulated that enslaved mulattoes, Africans, and Native Americans could be bought and sold by their owners at any time, just like any other property, and that their offspring would live under the same conditions. In a more precise conceptual sense, this meant that a chattel would continuously produce another chattel — even when it was two human beings producing another human being (Miers, 2003; Ewald, 1992).

Legal Codification and the Reduction of Africans to Property

In 1662, Virginia drafted its own law, creating the chattel condition for Africans by declaring that they would remain enslaved for life and that their slave status would be automatically transferred to their children. The statute held that every child born in the colony would be free or enslaved depending on the status of the child's mother (Hening, 1819, 3:252). The Maryland colony, in 1664, went further, providing that any free English woman who married a male slave would become a servant to her husband's master for the duration of her husband's life, and that every child born of such a union would remain enslaved like their father (Hening, 1819, 3:252).

In many cases, then, the mother's condition — even if she was free-born and white — was manipulated to subject children to perpetual enslavement. They would become, like their father, chattel. This reveals the calculated nature of the legal framework. Slave masters were well aware that Africans, as human beings, could marry white individuals or have children together, but to sustain the ideological structure of the slave system, these circumstances had to be redefined. A free white woman might effectively be reclassified as "black" through her marriage to a black man. Conversely, a white man fathering children with a black woman would not lose his status, though the children were still classified as chattel (Black History Resources Working Group, 1997; Miers, 2003).