Antebellum patent law denied enslaved and free Black inventors alike

Evidence

“In 1858, Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black issued an opinion on the patentability of a ‘new and useful machine invented by a slave.’ He needed only three sentences to explain that an invention by an enslaved inventor could not be patented…. This reasoning also placed free African Americans outside the bounds of patent law.” Kara Swinson, “Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on Invention of a Slave,” Columbia Law Review 120, no. 4 (2020): 1077, 1078 (citations omitted). — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 672

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the saturated-system harm architecture: even a slave’s invention was legally unownable — an infrastructural exclusion reaching beyond slavery itself, echoing the trees/grafting framing.