WI: American Slavery where child of slave and master had to be set free from birth?

So, I had a thought. What if as a result of a court ruling, either as an English colony or later after Independence, it was ruled that if a child came about as the result of master raping his slave, said child would be declared born free from the shackles of slavery?
 
To us slavery was a crime too. You need to change the definitions of slavery to make your scenario happen

Anyway, the court rules that when there is a liaison between a slave and non slave resulting in a live birth, the child is considered a free person and the slavery is not an inherited condition for said child. What impact would that have?
 
Honestly I don't see much change, slave owners would just not claim their children as their own, if they wanted to keep them in slavery, which they didn't do anyway in OTL. But some pale slave may sue their owners claiming they was their children or children of their former owners (like their owner's father).
 
How fixed were slavery back then?

So I checked Wikipedia and apparently this actually did happen and a colonial legislature passed a law preventing this in the future.

"In 1656 Elizabeth Key won a suit for freedom based on her father's status as a free Englishman, and his having baptized her as Christian in the Church of England. In 1662 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law with the doctrine of partus, stating that any child born in the colony would follow the status of its mother, bond or free. This was an overturn of a longheld principle of English Common Law, whereby a child's status followed that of the father. It enabled slaveholders and other white men to hide the mixed-race children born of their rape of slave women and removed their responsibility to acknowledge, support, or emancipate the children."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_colonial_United_States

I guess we need an English court to overturn the colonial law and solidify the English common law principle.
 

samcster94

Banned
Of course, it could happen in a timeline(with an early enough POD), where slavery has a Brazil-like decline as a way to reform slavery(like freeing the elderly) as it wanes.
 
It will certanly add to conflict between the american slaveowners and the english crown.

True but with a POD in the 1660s we could see a small but functionally larger than OTL free POC population by the time of an alt-American Revolution 100 years later
 
AFAIK that was the way in the French possessions, like Haïti, which lead to the emergence of a "Free Negro" class, which struggled with the planteurs caste for rights and power, and favorised the end of slavery because it would make their own power swell.
So the consequences would be rather positive I think.
 
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