Word: chattel
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Without the long presence of chattel slavery, Americans would not have allowed the usual animosities springing from cultural differences to boil up into murderous hatreds. Without the Negro, there would have been no Civil War, yet he figured only peripherally in the War literature. Often presented sympathetically (which ordinarily meant sentimentally and patronizingly), he remained even in the midst of his well-wishers an object of contempt or dread, or an uncomfortable reminder of abandoned obligations, or a pestiferous shadow, emblematic of guilt and retribution...
Boycotts are a drag. You're tired of them, just as the farm workers are tired of striking (and all that goes with it). But the workers will not be reduced to chattel again. Least of all Teamster chattel. Cesar Chavez asks consumers to unite as never before. No less will cause the growers to grant workers the simple right to vote, by secret ballot, on the union to represent them: the UFW or the Teamsters...
...differences between an infant and an adolescent, but the basic legal principle for all minors is that the parent knows best. In broad terms, says William Aikman of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, "the child's legal status is an amalgam of noncitizen, slave, overprotected pet and valuable chattel." He has no legal right to work, to choose his own friends, or to decide on his religion. Adds Henry Foster, who teaches family law at New York University: "Women used to need a guardian before they could enter a court. Now that feudal concept applies only to children...
Dillard explains that Black English first began to take form during the period immediately before the Atlantic slave trade. As Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English traders began to comb the coasts of Africa looking for chattel, a number of Africans began to incorporate European words into their vocabulary. When the great slave trade began, blacks from many different language groups were thrown together in ships and packed off to the New World. Communication between people who spoke diverse African languages was impossible until the growth of a common language based on the one language to which all the slaves that...
...course, had only themselves to blame. They, after all, had been the people who had constantly demanded that the supply of slaves be increased. They had lost their war with the North largely because so much of the South's capital was in the fatally non-negotiable form of chattel slavery. Moreover, fearing that any mobilization of the black population would lead to the formation of a hostile fifth column, the Confederacy failed to make any practical use of its major source of manpower...