n 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 except
Hager who had come drunk and without invitation. In the trial court, in
Rutherford County where the tragedy had occurred, the judge excluded
evidence that such corn huskings were the custom of the country without the
requirement of written permission for the slaves attending, and he charged
the jury that Jones' employment of Isaac and Isaac's death on his premises
made him liable to Allen for the value of the slave. But on Jones' appeal
the Supreme Court overruled this, asserting that "under our modified form
of slavery slaves are not