[Footnote 1:  The source of this error lies doubtless in Lord Mansfield’s famous but fallacious decision of 1772 in the Somerset case, which is recorded in Howell’s State Trials, XX, Sec. 548.  That decision is well criticized in T.R.R.  Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (vol.  I, all published, Philadelphia and Savannah, 1858), pp. 163-175.

Cobb’s treatise, though dealing with slaves as persons only and not as property, is the best of the general analyses of the legal phase of the slaveholding regime.  A briefer survey is in the Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure, William Mack ed., XXXVI (New York, 1910), 465-495.  The works of G.M.  Stroud, A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States (Philadelphia, 1827), and William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice (New York, 1853), are somewhat vitiated by the animus of their authors.

The many statutes concerning slavery enacted in the several colonies, territories and states are listed and many of them summarized in J.C.  Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States (Boston, 1858), I, 228-311; II, 1-218.  Some hundreds of court decisions in the premises are given in J.D.  Wheeler, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Slavery (New York and New Orleans, 1837); and all the thousands of decisions of published record are briefly digested in The Century Edition of the American Digest, XLIV (St. Paul, 1903), 853-1152.

The development of the slave code in Virginia is traced in J.C.  Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902), supplemented by J.H.  Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia (Baltimore, 1913); and the legal regime of slavery in South Carolina at the middle of the nineteenth century is described by Judge J.B.  O’Neall in The Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States, J.B.D.  DeBow ed., II (New Orleans, 1853), 269-292.]

As a rule each slaveholding colony or state adopted early in its career a series of laws of limited scope to meet definite issues as they were successively encountered.  Then when accumulated experience had shown a community that it had a general problem of regulation on its hands its legislature commonly passed an act of many clauses to define the status of slaves, to provide the machinery of their police, and to prescribe legal procedure in cases concerning them whether as property or as persons.  Thereafter the recourse was again to specific enactments from time to time to supplement this general or basic statute as the rise of new circumstances or policies gave occasion.  The likeness of conditions in the several communities and the difficulty of devising laws to comply with intricate custom and at the same time to guard against apprehended ills led to much intercolonial and interstate borrowing of statutes.  A perfect chain of this sort, with each link a basic police