This is the melodrama which the sober court record recites.  The female villain of the piece and her craven henchman were foiled by the sturdy but wily trustee and the doughty Carolina colonel who, in headlong, aristocratic championship of those threatened with oppression against the moral sense of the community, charged upon the scene and counseled slaughter if necessary in defense of negroes who were none of his.  And in the end the magistrates and jurors, proving second Daniels come to judgment, endorsed the victory of benevolence over avarice and assured the so-called slaves their thinly veiled freedom.  Curiously, however, the decision in this case was instanced by a contemporary traveller to prove that negroes freed by will in South Carolina might be legally enslaved by any person seizing them, and that the bequest of slaves in trust to an executor as a merely nominal master was contrary to law;[26] and in later times a historian has instanced the traveller’s account in support of his own statement that “Persons who had been set free for years and had no reason to suppose that they were anything else might be seized upon for defects in the legal process of manumission."[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.  Allen thereupon sued Jones for damages on the ground that the latter had knowingly and unlawfully suffered Isaac, without the legally required authorization, to come with other slaves upon his premises, where he had been slain to his owner’s loss.  The testimony showed that Allen had not received Jones’ message and had given Isaac no permission to go, but that Jones had not questioned Isaac in this regard; that Jones had given spirituous liquors to the slaves while at work, Isaac included, but that no one there was intoxicated