Abstract

Hiring the Enslaved: Custom, Bailment, and Slavery’s Commercial Law

In 1844, Adeline, an Alabama enslaved woman, was hired out by one slaveholder to another, then by that hirer to a second one. There, Adeline fell ill and died, feverish, pregnant and alone. In Wilkinson v. Moseley, Adeline’s owner and hirers fought over the financial loss her death represented, a grisly yet common type of legal dispute. Unusually, however, Wilkinson became a protracted clash between appellate and local law. Over nearly fifteen years, the Alabama Supreme Court overturned four separate local jury verdicts, ordering a full retrial each time. Disputes over slave hiring posed a particular quandary for a divided legal system caught up in the transition to capitalism. In the early nineteenth-century South, as Laura Edwards has found, high-stakes sales were usually governed by doctrinal commercial law. But relationships between slaves, owners, and community members were often resolved, instead or in addition, by “justices’ law,” the written and unwritten law governing a range of disputes within community relationships. Slave hiring disputes were both. Their monetary stakes could be as high as those of a sale. Yet they also dealt with labor relationships and the community norms keeping them in unsteady equilibrium, justices’ law’s terrain. Commercial law and justices’ law approaches each had a claim to resolving the disputes of slave hiring. Wilkinson’s many opinions, alongside those in similar cases, show that slave hiring was a tension point at a moment of legal transition. Judges trying to commercialize slave hiring had their work cut out for them.