Definition
A person held as the legal property of another, wholly subject to the master's will and authority, with no recognized legal personhood in the civil sense and no capacity to own property, enter contracts, or exercise personal liberty. The slave was, in legal contemplation, a thing rather than a person — an object of property rights rather than a holder of them.
In antebellum American law, the status of slave was hereditary, racially constructed by statute, and perpetual. The master held the power to sell, transfer, bequeath, and mortgage the enslaved person and to direct their labor absolutely. Enslaved persons could not testify against white persons, could not legally marry, and had no parental rights recognized at law. Children born to an enslaved mother inherited the mother's condition regardless of the father's status (partus sequitur ventrem).
Bouvier notes a qualification of practical importance: even in slaveholding states, the law placed some limits on a master's authority — the life and limbs of the enslaved were nominally protected from lethal violence by third parties and, in some jurisdictions, from the master. These limits were narrow and inconsistently enforced, but their existence distinguishes American chattel slavery from the Roman model, under which the master held absolute dominion, including the power of life and death, over the slave (though Roman law also evolved restrictions over time).
Common Language
Wiktionary (modern common usage): To work hard; to labor strenuously. Also, in electronics/computing, to place a device under the control of another device. The noun form refers to a person held in slavery.
Webster's 1913: Webster's 1913 redirects "slave" to the entry for "Slav," reflecting a different editorial choice, but common usage at that period encompassed both the noun (a person held in bondage) and the verb (to labor excessively).
The gap between modern common usage and legal usage is historically significant in one direction: the legal definition is far more precise and institutionally constructed than everyday usage suggests. The casual modern metaphor — "I was a slave to the schedule" — evacuates the legal content almost entirely. In legal-historical research, "slave" is never a loose metaphor; it names a specific legal status with enumerated disabilities and a specific body of property law governing it. Researchers encountering the term in historical sources must read it as a term of art with full legal weight.
Common Confusion
Slave / Servant / Serf: Burrill traces the linguistic kinship — the Latin servus and French serf share a root — and legal dictionaries of earlier periods sometimes used "bondman" and "slave" interchangeably. In practice, these were distinct legal categories. A servant held a contractual or customary relationship terminable by law or agreement; a serf was bound to the land but not fully alienable as personal property; a slave was personal property, fully alienable, with the status hereditary and perpetual. Researchers using pre-1800 English legal sources should not assume these terms were interchangeable in the American chattel slavery context.
Slave / Free Person of Color: Antebellum law created a third category that neither source dictionary fully develops: the free Black person. The legal disabilities attached to free persons of color in slaveholding states were substantial but categorically different from enslavement. Confusing the two statuses produces significant research errors.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
American chattel slavery: The dominant American legal form — the enslaved person as personal property (chattel), fully alienable, with status determined by maternal lineage.
Roman slavery (servitude): The comparative baseline in Bouvier and in classical legal treatises. Roman law classified the slave among things (res) rather than persons, but Roman slavery was not racially defined and manumission was more legally accessible.
Fugitive slave (legal designation): A distinct legal category under federal law, governing enslaved persons who escaped into free states. The Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 created specific procedural mechanisms and obligations for return, generating a separate body of case law.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is among the most legally freighted in the American corpus, and researchers face several navigational challenges.
First, the historical dictionary definitions are artifacts of their era and require critical handling. Black's (both editions) and Burrill quote Webster's definition as though it were a neutral legal description. Bouvier's framing — "unlimited control" modified by law — is more legally precise but still written from within a system that accepted the institution. None of the historical dictionaries is an abolitionist document, and none reflects the post-Thirteenth Amendment legal world. Using these definitions unreflectively, as though they were timeless, would be an error.
Second, the legal status of "slave" was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), but its residue appears throughout the Law Mind corpus in several forms: pre-war cases treating enslaved persons as property, claims for freedom litigated in courts, conflicts-of-laws disputes about whether freedom obtained in a free state could be revoked upon return, and post-war litigation over contracts, wills, and property involving formerly enslaved persons. Researchers must track the before/after divide carefully.
Third, the intersection of slave status with property law, family law, tort law, and constitutional law is dense. An enslaved person could be the subject of a will, a mortgage, an insurance contract, or a conversion claim — all treated identically to disputes over livestock or furniture in the legal documents. Researchers working in property, contracts, or commercial law will encounter slave law where they might not expect it.
Fourth, the racial construction of slave status varied by statute across slaveholding states. Definitions of who counted as "Black" or "of color" for purposes of the presumption of slave status differed, generating litigation over racial identity that fed into both civil and criminal courts.
Fifth, terminology in historical sources is not consistent. "Bondman," "bondservant," "negro," "colored person," "servant," and "slave" appear in overlapping ways across different periods and jurisdictions. Source criticism is essential.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries show a pattern of convergence on definition and divergence on framing. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) are nearly identical, both relying heavily on the Webster definition — a person wholly subject to another's will — and adding the commercial dimension: the master may sell, dispose of person, industry, and labor. Burrill similarly chains to Webster and Bouvier.
Bouvier's entry is the most legally precise of the group. Its acknowledgment that "every limitation placed by law upon the absolute control modifies and to that extent changes the condition of the slave" reflects genuine jurisprudential complexity — the institution was not legally monolithic, and statutory variations across slaveholding states created meaningful doctrinal distinctions that courts had to navigate. Bouvier also draws the Roman comparison, noting that Roman law classed the slave among things (res), which is analytically useful for researchers working in comparative legal history.
What all four sources miss, because they predate or decline to address abolition's aftermath: the legal transformation effected by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. None of these dictionary entries was written to describe the post-war world, and the silence is itself informative about when these dictionaries were compiled and for what audience.
Jurisdictional Note
Slave law was a creature of state statute, not federal common law. The specific rules governing presumption of slave status, the treatment of mixed-race persons, the legal consequences of manumission, and the rights (such as they were) of enslaved persons varied across the slaveholding states. Federal law entered primarily through the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Acts. Researchers should not generalize from one state's slave code to another without verification.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Thirteenth Amendment; Fugitive Slave Acts; Chattel Property; Antebellum Constitutional Law; Freedom Suits