The Liberator (newspaper)/September 18, 1857/Slave Law Case

Slave Law Case.

——————, (Ky.) Sept. 9, 1857.

To the Editor of the Liberator:—

I send you a statement of a law case, recently decided in this State, that may be of interest to your readers. The case has been appealed, but I have little hope of its reversal. The Dred Scott decision is making its mark. Five years ago, no Kentucky court would have ever thought of rendering such a decision as the one I report.

Stephen Kyler, a negro, who was born a slave, was emancipated by his master, Joseph Kyler, in 1843, and has since that time been a freeman. For several years prior to his emancipation, he cohabited with and was the husband (so far as by the laws of Kentucky, the place of their residence and nativity, he could be a husband) of a female slave named Cynthia, the property of a neighbor. Joseph Kyler, the former owner of Stephen, who was a bachelor and an old man, being anxious to secure Cynthia to Stephen as a wife, purchased her of her owner, but could not, under the Kentucky Constitution of 1850, and an act of the Legislature passed in pursuance thereof, emancipate her without her emigrating from the State, which was not required by law when Stephen was freed. This being the case, and Stephen and Cynthia desiring to remain in Kentucky, Joseph Kyler consulted a lawyer as to the best method of effecting his intentions, who advised him to convey her to Stephen, which he did in 1853, without any consideration. The conveyance, which was an ordinary bill of sale, was absolute on its face, but the object and understanding of the parties was not to convey Cynthia to Stephen as property, or so as to lay her liable for his debts, or to enable him to sell her or exercise any other power or control over her than that of husband, and he has at no time claimed or exercised any other right or power.

Prior to this conveyance, in the year 1849, Hon. George W. Dunlap, a lawyer, had recovered a judgment against Stephen for attorney’s fees, and in 1857 had a writ of fieri facias on the judgment, and levied by an officer on Cynthia as the property of Stephen, and was proceeding to have her sold as a slave for its satisfaction. To prevent this, a suit was instituted by Stephen and Cynthia against Dunlap and the officer, by which they prayed the court to declare that she was not the property, but the wife of Stephen; and even if she should be held to be the property of Stephen, that she was not liable for Dunlap’s debt, it having been contracted before the conveyance of Cynthia to Stephen; and the conveyance, if fraudulent as to Stephen’s creditors at all, in consequence of its being unconditional, (as contended for by Dunlap,) was not fraudulent as to creditors whose claims were in existence at the time.

The case was tried at the August term, 1857, of the Garrard Circuit Court, in the State of Kentucky, and was elaborately argued by Allan A. Burton and L. Landram, Esqs., for Stephen and Cynthia, and by Dunlap for himself; and the court held that Cynthia was not a wife, but property merely, and as such liable to be sold for her husband’s debt to Dunlap.

The decision was appealed from, and will be tried at the December term, 1857, of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky.