"[27]
[Footnote 26: J.S. Buckingham, _Slave States in America_, II, 32, 33.]
[Footnote 27: A.B. Hart, _Slavery and Abolition_ (New York, 1906), p. 88.]
Now according to the letter of certain statutes at certain times, these
assertions were severally more or less true; but if this particular case
and its outcome have any palpable meaning, it is that the courts connived
at thwarting such provisions by sanctioning, as a proprietorship valid
against the claim of a captor, what was in obvious fact a merely nominal
dominion.
Another striking case in which the severity of the law was overridden by
the court in sanction of lenient custom was that of Jones _vs_. Allen,
decided on appeal by the Supreme Court of Tennessee in 1858. In the fall of
the preceding year Jones had called in his neighbors and their slaves to
a corn husking and had sent Allen a message asking him to send help. Some
twenty-five white men and seventy-five slaves gathered on the appointed
night, among them Allen's slave Isaac. After supper, about midnight, Jones
told the negroes to go home; but Isaac stayed a while with some others
wrestling in the back yard, during which, while Jones was not present, a
white man named Hager stabbed Isaac to death.
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