''Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Nathaniel Jennison'' was a decisive

court case A legal case is in a general sense a dispute between opposing parties which may be resolved by a court, or by some equivalent legal process. A legal case is typically based on either civil or criminal law. In most legal cases there are one or mor ...

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in 1783 which effectively abolished slavery in that state. 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 Quock Walker, also known as Kwaku or Quork Walker (1753 – ?), was an American slave who sued for and won his freedom in June 1781 in a case citing language in the new Massachusetts Constitution (1780) that declared all men to be born free and e ...

and indicted on a criminal charge of assault and

battery Battery most often refers to: * Electric battery, a device that provides electrical power * Battery (crime), a crime involving unlawful physical contact Battery may also refer to: Energy source *Automotive battery, a device to provide power t ...

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 In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th century to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called fre ...

but Walker countered that the

Massachusetts Constitution The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the fundamental governing document of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, one of the 50 individual state governments that make up the United States of America. As a member of the Massachuset ...

had made slavery illegal in 1780. Chief Justice

William Cushing William Cushing (March 1, 1732 – September 13, 1810) was one of the original five associate justices of the United States Supreme Court; confirmed by the United States Senate on September 26, 1789, he served until his death. His Supreme Court ...

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. 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. However, it's understood that many former slaveowners reclassified their former slaves as still-legal "

indentured servant Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered "voluntarily" for purported eventual compensation or debt repaymen ...

s." 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. Edward L. Bell in his 2021 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 outcomes 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, Edward L. (2021). ''Persistence of Memories of Slavery and Emancipation in Historical Andover''. Boston: Shawsheen Press. p. 197. .

References

{{reflist Massachusetts state case law 1783 in case law 1783 in Massachusetts United States slavery case law Abolitionism in the United States Law articles needing an infobox African-American history of Massachusetts

See also

References