Definition
In law, "servants" refers collectively to persons whose labor and conduct are directed and controlled by another party — the master — under a relationship that imposes legal duties and liabilities on both sides. The term encompasses two historically distinct categories: (1) domestic or household servants, persons employed in personal or household service under the direct supervision of a householder; and (2) in the broader common law tradition, any person who agrees to work under the direction and control of another, making the employer legally responsible for acts done within the scope of that service.
In Louisiana specifically, "servants" carried a statutory definition that was unusually broad: it included enslaved persons and, generally, all free persons who let, hired, or engaged their services to another within the state for any work, commerce, or occupation, for a fixed sum, retribution, or upon certain conditions. This definition appeared in the Louisiana Civil Code and reflected the state's mixed civil law and slave-society heritage.
At common law, the practical significance of "servants" lay not in the label but in the legal consequences it triggered — primarily vicarious liability of the master for the servant's wrongful acts committed within the scope of employment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of servant; persons who perform duties for others, especially domestic workers in a household.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Persons of either sex who work for wages in another's household or under another's direction; often specifically domestic help.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is one of scope, not kind. Ordinary usage confines "servants" to household domestics. The legal meaning, especially under the master-servant doctrine, extended to virtually any employee working under another's control and direction — factory workers, farm hands, clerks, and agents could all qualify as servants in law. A researcher encountering "servant" in a legal source should not assume the term is limited to domestic staff.
Common Confusion
SERVANTS vs. AGENTS: These categories overlap but are not identical. A servant acts under the direct control of the master as to the manner of work; an agent acts on behalf of a principal to create legal relations with third parties. A person can be both simultaneously. The distinction matters because the scope of vicarious liability differs: masters are liable for servants' torts; principals' liability for agents' torts is narrower.
SERVANTS vs. INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS: The master-servant relationship requires the master to control not just the result of the work but the manner and means of its performance. Independent contractors control their own methods. This distinction is the direct ancestor of the modern employee/independent contractor divide and generates the same litigation today under different labels.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Domestic servants: Household employees under direct personal supervision of a householder; the common-language meaning.
General servants: Employees in commercial, agricultural, or industrial contexts under the master's direction and control.
Special servants: Persons whose services are temporarily lent or hired out by their general master to a third party; liability questions become complex when the servant injures someone while under the special master's direction.
Servants in Louisiana (statutory): All persons, free or enslaved, who contracted their services to another for work, commerce, or occupation — the broadest American statutory definition of the term.
Why It Matters in Research
The term "servants" is a corpus trap for researchers working across time periods. In modern employment law sources, the word rarely appears; "employees" has replaced it almost entirely. But in primary sources before the mid-twentieth century — cases, treatises, jury instructions, and statutes — "servants" is the operative term for what we now call employees, and "master and servant" is the organizing doctrine for what is now employment law and respondeat superior liability.
Researchers should be alert to three specific hazards:
First, the Louisiana statutory definition is a jurisdictional outlier. It explicitly included enslaved persons, and pre-Civil War Louisiana sources using "servants" may be referring to enslaved individuals, free workers, or both without distinction. Treat Louisiana sources before 1865 with particular care.
Second, the shift from "master and servant" to "employer and employee" in legal usage is gradual and uneven across jurisdictions. Federal labor statutes from the New Deal era accelerated the terminological transition, but state common law cases continued using "servant" well into the mid-twentieth century.
Third, the servant/independent contractor distinction — critical in modern gig-economy litigation — is not a recent invention. Its doctrinal roots lie entirely within master-and-servant case law, and researchers tracing the history of that distinction must work through sources organized under "servants."
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry presents the term in two registers: the Louisiana Civil Code definition (broad, statutory, explicitly including enslaved persons) and the common law domestic sense (household persons employed for wages). Bouvier does not fully articulate the broader common law master-and-servant framework — respondeat superior, the scope-of-employment test, the servant/independent contractor distinction — though these doctrines were well developed by the time of Bouvier's editions.
What Bouvier's entry notably omits is the doctrinal engine that made the category legally significant: vicarious liability. A researcher relying solely on Bouvier for this term would understand who qualified as a servant but not why the classification mattered in litigation. For the full doctrinal treatment, Bouvier must be supplemented with treatise sources, particularly the master-and-servant treatises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Louisiana definition quoted by Bouvier (La. Civ. Code, art. 155) is historically significant because it demonstrates how slave-state law formally categorized enslaved persons within the law of service relationships — a framing that has implications for how researchers interpret any Louisiana contract or tort case from that era.
Jurisdictional Note
The master-and-servant doctrine is common law in origin and applies across common law jurisdictions, though the terminology has been displaced by statutory employment law in most modern contexts. Louisiana's civil law heritage and its historical slave code produced definitions of "servants" not found elsewhere in American law. In England, the term retained its domestic connotation more narrowly than in American commercial law usage.