Quotes about Chattel

Ayn Rand

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

Arab Proverb

Just as livestock is property, so women are property And livestock brings blame to its owner.

This proverb is a large part of the conceptual basis of the concept of honor killing. It starts with the notion that women are property. However, being animate property women are in the same class as livestock. And if a camel or a donkey get lose and does damage, the owner is responsible. So if a woman does something wrong, it is the father or the husband who is responsible. Since sexual behavior of most kinds is contrary to the Islamic custom and law, any activity in this regard, demonstrates that the father of husband has not been up to his obligations and is therefore dishonored. Therefore, the least he can do, to provide a deterrent to other women is to kill the offending female. Without the concept of property, the entire chain of logic collapses under its own weight.

Thomas Jefferson

Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of these unfortunate beings [slaves], few minds have yet doubted that they were as legitimate subjects of property as their horses or cattle

Thorstein Veblen

From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons.

James Kinsey

They [Indians] have so long been recognized as slaves in our law, that it would be as great a violation of the rights of property to establish a contrary doctrine at the present day, as it would in the case of Africans, and as useless to investigate the manner in which they originally lost their freedom.

Harriet Jacobs

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

Jacob D. Wheeler

Slaves may be sold and transferred from one to another without any statutory restriction or limitation, as to the separation of parents and children, &c., except in the State of Louisiana.

Louisiana to this day has a different legal system from the rest of the United States as it was originally based on the French Napoleonic Code. Most people did not realize that Louisiana had strictures against breaking up families—even with slaves.

William Goodell

SLAVES CANNOT MARRY. Being held as Property, and incapable of making any Contract, they cannot contract Marriage recognized by Law. MEN may forget or disregard the rules of logic in their reasonings about slavery, but the genius that presides over American slavery never forgets or disregards them. From its well-defined principle of human chattelhood it never departs, for a single moment. If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences. From a single fundamental axiom, all the parts of the system are logically and scientifically educed. And no man fully understands the system, who does not study it in the light of that axiom. The slave has no rights. Of course he, or she, cannot have the rights of a husband, a wife. The slave is a chattel, and chattels do not marry. The slave is not ranked among sentient beings, but among things, and things are not married. Slaves are not people, in the eye of the law. They have no legal personality. So said by their votes, the Federal Congress.

Abolition was an issue from the first Congress onward. By the 1850s there was a major, and in the view of the Southern Slavery enthusiasts, incessant political, journalistic, and intellectual attacks on slavery. The latter two really affected public opinion and opposition to slavery grew in intellectual and educated circles. This document was an example of the literature of the time where the attack on slavery was made by simply explaining the “logic and facts” of the existing laws of the slave states. Once exposed in their entirety, the horror and immorality of the institution was supplemented by the intellectual absurdity and logical fallacies of the pro slavery forces. Note the swipe Goodell takes at Congress. This kind of public criticism made it harder and harder for the Northern Congressmen to “go along” with the South on the slavery issue, and the next decade of increased polarization on slavery culminated in the Civil War. It was not the Southern representatives who changed, but consciousness raising and public opinion changed the Northern perspective and the voting of the Northerners to oppose slavery. Earlier “compromises” became no longer morally or politically acceptable.

Charles Sumner

By the Law of Slavery, man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a mere chattel.

Louisiana

If, at a public sale of slaves, there happen to be some who are disabled through old age or otherwise, and who have children, such slaves shall not be sold but with his or her children, whom he or she may think proper to go with.

In the brutal history of slavery there were very few instances of any degree of minimal humanity by slave states. This is one.

Chattel Quotes