Definition
Manstealing is an archaic legal term for the act of seizing, carrying away, or otherwise unlawfully taking a person by force or fraud — essentially, kidnapping. Historically, the term carried an additional dimension beyond simple kidnapping: it was frequently used in the context of taking persons for the purpose of enslaving them, a usage that reflects the term's prominence in legal and moral discourse surrounding the Atlantic slave trade and antebellum American law.
Though occasionally treated as a direct synonym for kidnapping, Bouvier notes that "kidnapping" is the more technically precise term. Manstealing fell out of active legal use as kidnapping became the standard terminology in statutes and case law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Kidnapping human beings, especially with a view to their enslavement.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act or business of stealing or kidnapping human beings, especially with a view to enslavement.
Editorial note: The common and legal meanings are unusually close here, but the legal usage is narrower in one respect and broader in another. Common usage emphasizes the enslavement purpose as the defining feature; legal usage treated manstealing as coextensive with kidnapping generally, without requiring the enslavement motive. Researchers should not assume that every legal use of the term implies enslavement — context is essential.
Common Confusion
Manstealing is sometimes treated as a perfect synonym for kidnapping, but the two terms are not identical in scope or tone. Kidnapping is a formal term of art with specific statutory definitions that evolved through the 19th and 20th centuries. Manstealing is an older, non-technical label that never acquired a settled statutory definition of its own. Additionally, in abolitionist legal writing and certain antebellum statutes, "manstealing" was used specifically as a moral and legal condemnation of slave trading and slave catching — a usage that has no direct equivalent in the law of kidnapping. Conflating the two terms when researching historical sources can cause researchers to miss this significant contextual layer.
Why It Matters in Research
This term requires careful handling in historical sources for three reasons.
First, temporal range matters. Manstealing appears most frequently in sources predating the mid-19th century. After the Civil War and the codification of kidnapping statutes across U.S. jurisdictions, the term largely disappears from legal writing. If a search of the Law Mind corpus returns manstealing results from post-Reconstruction sources, those results likely appear in historical commentary or reprinted earlier materials, not in live legal usage.
Second, the enslavement context is legally significant. In antebellum legal and legislative materials — including federal statutes prohibiting the international slave trade — manstealing was used as a specific charge or moral category distinct from ordinary kidnapping. Researchers working on slavery law, abolition, or the history of human trafficking will find the term appears in sources where kidnapping does not, and vice versa. The two search terms are not interchangeable for this period.
Third, the term connects to biblical and natural law discourse. Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Com. 219, cited by Bouvier) treats manstealing in the context of offenses against personal liberty, and earlier writers used the term to invoke Mosaic law prohibitions. Researchers working on natural law foundations of criminal law or on the intersection of religion and law in the colonial and early republic periods will encounter manstealing in that register, which is distinct from its purely statutory use.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five source dictionaries are in near-complete agreement: manstealing is a synonym for kidnapping, with kidnapping being the more technically precise term. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence treat the terms as interchangeable. Anderson simply cross-references kidnapping without further comment. Bouvier adds the most useful nuance, distinguishing manstealing as the less technical of the two terms and citing Blackstone as authority.
What the historical dictionaries largely omit is the enslavement-specific usage that was prominent in legislative and abolitionist contexts during the 18th and 19th centuries. The dictionary definitions are definitionally thin precisely because manstealing never acquired a formal statutory identity — it remained a descriptive term that borrowed its legal content from kidnapping doctrine. Researchers should treat the historical dictionary entries as a starting point only and consult primary legislative and judicial sources for the full contextual picture.
Jurisdictional Note
Manstealing never became a term of art in any major common law jurisdiction's codified criminal statutes. Its appearance in American sources is most concentrated in federal materials related to the slave trade and in state-level abolitionist legislation. English law absorbed the concept entirely within the law of kidnapping.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Kidnapping; Slavery and the Law; Offenses Against the Person.