Under the law of nature, all men are born free
[This is an excerpt of my argument in the court case, Howell v. Netherland, where I defended a slave, Samuel Howell, on April 1770. Unfortunately, I was not successful. However, I took on another enslaved client, George Manly, in 1772 — I was successful in that case. When free, Mr. Manly later worked in Monticello for wages. In my seven-year career as a lawyer (1767-1774), I represented seven free-seeking enslaved men pro bono.]
On behalf of the plaintiff it was insisted, 1st, that if he could be detained in servitude by his first master, he could not be aliened. But 2nd, that he could not be detained in servitude.
Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance. The reducing the mother to servitude was a violation of the law of nature: surely then the same law cannot prescribe a continuance of the violation to her issue, and that too without end, for if it extends to any, it must to every degree of descendants. Puff. b. 6. c. 3. s. 4. 9. supports this doctrine.
For having proved that servitude to be rightful, must be founded on either compact, or capture in war, he proceeds to shew that the children of the latter only follow the condition of the mother: for which he gives this reason, that the person and labor of the mother in a condition of perfect slavery, (as he supposes to be that of the captive in war) being the property of the master, it is impossible she should maintain it but with her master’s goods; by which he supposes a debt contracted from the infant to the master. But he says in cases of servitude founded on contract, “The food of the future issue is contained or implied in their own maintenance, which their master owes them as a just debt; and consequently their children are not involved in a necessity of slavery.” This is the nature of the servitude introduced by the act of 1705, the master deriving his title to the service of the mother, entirely from the contract entered into with the churchwardens. That the bondage of the mother does not under the law of nature, infer that of her issue, as included in her, is further obvious from this consideration, that by the same reason, the bondage of the father would infer that of his issue; for he may with equal, and some anatomists say with greater reason, be said to include all his posterity. But this very law admits there is no such descent of condition from father to child, when it imposes servitude on the child of a slave, which would have been unnecessary, if the condition had descended of course.
Again, if it be a law of nature that the child shall follow the condition of the parent, it would introduce a very perplexing dilemma; as where the one parent is free and the other a slave. Here the child is to be a slave says this this law by inheritance of the father’s bondage: but it is also to be free, says the same law by inheritance of its mother’s freedom. This contradiction proves it to be no law of nature.
[P.S.: After I lost Sam Howell’s case, I gave Mr. Howell some money as consolation. I forgot about this but when I referred to my Memorandum Books of 1773, I recorded down on May 21, 1773, “George Manly began to work for me the 15th of this month. We made no agreement but I shall be willing to give him from ten to twelve pounds a year.” In 1773, the average annual income for colonial Americans was about 14 pounds, with free whites making about 16 pounds, and indentured servants earning about 9 pounds.]