Definition
Slavery, as a legal institution, was the civil condition in which one person was held as the absolute property of another — subject to that person's dominion over life, liberty, and fortune — with no legal personality of their own. The enslaved person could not own property, enter contracts, marry with legal effect, or seek judicial relief as a party. The condition was heritable: children born to an enslaved mother were themselves enslaved by operation of law.
In the United States, slavery existed as a legally recognized institution from the colonial period until its abolition by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1865), which prohibits both slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime. The legal category did not disappear with abolition; it became the constitutional baseline against which subsequent restrictions on forced labor and coercive conditions are measured.
In modern legal usage, slavery appears primarily in three contexts: (1) constitutional law, as the abolished institution defined by the Thirteenth Amendment and the standard against which "badges and incidents of slavery" are assessed; (2) international law, where slavery is a defined crime against humanity and jus cogens prohibition; and (3) criminal law, where statutes criminalizing forced labor, human trafficking, and debt bondage operate as statutory descendants of the abolition framework.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An institution or social practice of owning human beings as property, especially for use as forced laborers; also used more broadly for any condition of forced labor or captivating subjugation.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The condition of a slave; the state of entire subjection of one person to the will of another; also applied figuratively to any condition of subjection.
The gap between common and legal meaning runs in both directions. Common usage, particularly modern usage, often extends "slavery" metaphorically to any oppressive dependence. Legal usage is both more precise and, in constitutional doctrine, more consequential: courts have had to determine what conditions rise to the level of the abolished institution versus what constitutes the distinct (and separately prohibited) category of involuntary servitude. The figurative sense has no legal weight. Conversely, the legal concept of "badges and incidents of slavery" reaches beyond literal enslavement to encompass legal disabilities historically associated with the institution — a dimension invisible in ordinary usage.
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Common Confusion
Slavery and involuntary servitude are related but distinct legal categories, both prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment. Involuntary servitude covers compelled labor short of outright ownership — including peonage and debt bondage — and has been the operative category in most modern federal prosecutions, since chattel slavery as a formal legal institution no longer exists. Researchers working in post-1865 federal materials will encounter involuntary servitude far more frequently than slavery as a live legal term. Peonage is a subtype of involuntary servitude involving compelled service to discharge a debt and has its own statutory and doctrinal history.
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Core Elements
As a legal institution (pre-abolition), slavery was characterized by the following features recognized across American and English jurisprudence:
1. Chattel status: The enslaved person was legally classified as personal property, transferable by sale, bequest, or gift.
2. Absolute dominion: The enslaver held legally recognized authority over the person's labor, movement, and physical condition, subject in theory (though rarely in practice) to prohibitions on extreme cruelty in some jurisdictions.
3. Heritability: Status passed through the mother (partus sequitur ventrem), making the condition self-perpetuating across generations.
4. Legal non-personhood: The enslaved person lacked standing to contract, sue, own property, or testify against white persons in most jurisdictions.
5. Racial codification (in American law): By the antebellum period, the institution was systematically racialized, with slavery legally presumed for persons of African descent in slave states.
These elements matter in constitutional research because Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence uses the contours of the historical institution to define what conditions constitute its "badges and incidents."
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-1865 American legal materials will encounter slavery as an active legal institution with its own elaborate body of case law, statute, and treatise commentary — governing the sale of enslaved persons, liability for their injury or death, the legal effect of freedom documents, fugitive slave proceedings, and the conflict-of-laws questions that arose when enslaved persons traveled to or through free states. This body of law is internally coherent and must be read on its own terms to understand the cases, even though the institution it governed is morally condemned and constitutionally abolished.
Post-1865 research presents a different navigational problem. The Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition is terse, but its implementing legislation (the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, and their successors) and subsequent constitutional doctrine have generated substantial complexity around the "badges and incidents" doctrine. Congress's power under Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment to legislate against conditions that are not slavery per se but that replicate its characteristic disabilities is an area of active doctrinal development. Researchers should not treat the Thirteenth Amendment as a single-moment event; its legal meaning has continued to evolve.
For international and comparative law research: the legal definition of slavery under international instruments (including the 1926 Slavery Convention and the Rome Statute) tracks the historical common law definition closely — ownership or the exercise of powers attaching to ownership — but applies in a jurisdictional and enforcement context entirely different from domestic constitutional law. Do not assume the constitutional definition and the international law definition will produce identical analytical results.
The Anderson's Dictionary of Law entry in the source material for this term is clearly a corrupt entry — it contains text evidently belonging to a different term (likely SLANDER), rendering it useless for this entry. This is a known hazard with historical legal dictionaries in which entries were typeset in sequence; a corrupted or misbound entry for one term may appear under another's headword.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are notable for their brevity and, in the post-1865 editions, their studied terseness. Black's Law Dictionary (both first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence define slavery identically: "that civil relation in which one man has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another." This definition accurately captures the jurisprudential conception of the institution but says nothing about its racial codification in American law — an omission that reflects the conventions of analytical jurisprudence at the time, which purported to describe legal categories in abstract terms stripped of their social context.
Burrill's Law Dictionary is more candid in its citation: it points to Kent's Commentaries for a substantive discussion, acknowledging that the dictionary entry alone is insufficient. Kent's treatment (2 Kent's Commentaries 247–257) is one of the fuller antebellum analyses of the American law of slavery and remains a useful starting point for understanding how contemporaneous jurists conceptualized the institution.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary declines a direct definition and redirects to Involuntary Servitude and Peonage — reflecting the post-abolition edition's orientation toward the legal categories that succeeded the institution rather than the institution itself.
None of the historical dictionaries addresses the constitutional aftermath, the Thirteenth Amendment's Section 2 enforcement power, or the developing doctrine of badges and incidents. For those dimensions, the dictionaries are useless and researchers must turn to constitutional commentaries and case law directly.
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Jurisdictional Note
Before 1865, the legal status of enslaved persons varied sharply between slave states and free states, and federal-state conflict over the institution generated some of the most consequential constitutional litigation in American history. After the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery is uniformly prohibited throughout U.S. jurisdiction. In international law, slavery is prohibited under jus cogens norms binding on all states, though domestic implementing legislation and enforcement vary considerably across national legal systems.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Thirteenth Amendment — Abolition of Slavery and Badges and Incidents (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)
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