Commonwealth v. Jennison

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Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Nathaniel Jennison was a decisive court case in Massachusetts in 1783 which effectively abolished slavery in that state.[1][2] It was the third in a series of cases which became known as the Quok Walker cases.

Nathaniel Jennison was arrested for beating Quock Walker and indicted on a criminal charge of assault and battery in September 1781. The trial before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts was held in April 1783. Jennison's defense was that Walker was a runaway slave but Walker countered that the Massachusetts Constitution had made slavery illegal in 1780. Chief Justice William Cushing accepted this argument and directed the jury that the issue of whether Walker had been freed or not was irrelevant because slavery was no longer constitutional. The jury convicted Jennison who was fined forty shillings.[3]

The case was not widely publicized but it made it clear that the law would not defend the property rights of slave-owners. Because this law depended on the enslaved person to take action to gain their freedom (either appealing to the courts or running away), people without the knowledge or the means to act continued to be held as slaves for years after the ruling. Slavery (or the willingness to reveal its presence) declined so that, by the time of the 1790 census, no slaves were recorded in this state.[4] However, it's understood that many former slaveowners reclassified their former slaves as still-legal "indentured servants."[5] This allowed the former masters to be both compliant with the law and still able to take advantage of the labor of enslaved people that might not otherwise be able to free themselves.

According to Edward L. Bell in his recent book, "Persistence of Memories of Slavery and Emancipation in Historical Andover," wrote the following:

"The 'Mum Bett' and 'Quock Walker' cases were heard as jury trials with party-particular outcomes. The decisions of the Common Pleas courts and Supreme Judicial Court were unpublished and only existed in original manuscript form. In eighteenth-century legal circles, which depended on memory of judicial decisions and bench rulings to invoke case-made common law principles, the cases were soon forgotten. Practicing legal professionals in at least Berkshire and Worcester counties remembered the outcomse for a time, and advised their slave-owning clients of the futility of defending or appealing lawsuits for liberty in a changed legal landscape" (Bell 197).

See also[]

  • Elizabeth Freeman, also known as "Mum Bett", another slave who won her freedom in court.

References[]

  1. ^ John J. Patrick (1995), Founding the Republic, p. 74, ISBN 9780313292262
  2. ^ Note: the commonwealth's legislature never passed a law abolishing slavery and slavery remained technically legal until the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery in all the states in 1865.
  3. ^ "Massachusetts Constitution, Judicial Review, and Slavery - The Quock Walker Case". mass.gov. Retrieved November 10, 2010.
  4. ^ John P. Kaminski (1995), A necessary evil?: slavery and the debate over the Constitution, p. 17, ISBN 9780945612339
  5. ^ Hardesty, Jared Ross (2019). Black Lives Native Lands White Worlds. A History of Slavery in New England. Boston: Bright Leaf. p. 126. ISBN 978-1-62534-457-1.
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