Definition
"I have blood in me if I had you in an [convenient place]" is a phrase treated in early common law as actionable spoken words — that is, words that, when uttered, could support a civil action for slander or, in some contexts, a criminal charge for threatening language. The phrase is an archaic form of conditional threat, implying that the speaker would do physical harm to the person addressed if circumstances permitted. In legal proceedings, the question was whether such words, on their face or in context, constituted a legally cognizable threat sufficient to ground liability or prosecution.
The phrase falls within the historical category of words actionable per se or words requiring an innuendo to establish their harmful import, depending on jurisdiction and period.
---
Common Confusion
This phrase should not be confused with direct words of assault or present-tense threatening language. At common law, a distinction was drawn between words spoken in the heat of the moment that expressed conditional future intent and words amounting to an immediate present threat. The conditional structure of this phrase — "if I had you in an [appropriate place]" — was legally significant: courts and treatise writers debated whether conditionality negated actionability or whether the clear threatening import was sufficient regardless of the grammatical condition.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early American or English common law materials on slander, threatening words, or the law of words will encounter this and similar archaic phrases catalogued in practice dictionaries primarily as illustrative specimens — entries that preserve the exact wording of a disputed utterance alongside a citation to the case or authority that resolved its legal status.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry for this phrase appears in a sequence of such word-specific entries (see also "Other Place, in indictment for words"), suggesting that the original citation — here incomplete in the surviving source text — directed practitioners to a specific reported decision establishing how courts treated this language. Researchers should treat such entries as finding aids pointing to case reporters rather than as self-contained statements of doctrine.
The practical trap: phrases like this one were highly context-dependent. The same words might be actionable in one county court record and dismissed in another depending on whether the surrounding circumstances — tone, relationship of parties, presence of witnesses — could be established. When working with colonial or early republic court records, do not assume the phrase carried uniform legal weight across jurisdictions.
This class of entry also illustrates the broader research challenge of archaic conditional threats in criminal and tort law. Modern threatening-language doctrine (true threats, assault) has largely displaced the old common law framework, so direct doctrinal continuity is limited. Researchers tracing the historical development of harassment, assault by words, or criminal threatening statutes will find these early entries useful as baseline data points.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence catalogue this phrase in the manner typical of their treatment of legally significant spoken or written words: a brief entry giving the exact phrase, followed by a citation to authority. The entry as preserved is incomplete — the citation that would have followed is truncated in the surviving source text — which limits its independent utility but confirms that the phrase had sufficient reported legal history to warrant inclusion in a practitioner's reference work of that era.
The entry's placement alongside "Other Place, in indictment for words" (citing Gilb. Eq. 36) is instructive. Gilbert's treatment of words in equity context suggests these phrases were not merely curios but were live questions about whether certain utterances could ground equitable or legal relief. The conditional threat structure of this particular phrase likely made it a recurring point of contention: defendants would argue the condition negated present menace; plaintiffs would argue the threatening intent was plain regardless of the grammatical form.
No competing or supplementary treatment of this specific phrase has been located in Bouvier, Black, or other standard historical dictionaries, which suggests it was a narrower point of pleading or evidence practice rather than a foundational doctrinal term.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The actionability of threatening words varied considerably between English common law courts and early American jurisdictions. Some American states by the mid-nineteenth century had codified threatening-language offenses in ways that mooted the old common law distinctions; others continued to rely on case-by-case analysis of whether particular words were sufficiently immediate and unconditional to ground liability.
---