Colonial legal codes defined enslaved Africans as chattel things rather than persons

Evidence

One paradoxical outcome of Las Casas’s campaign was that he got Indian slavery outlawed, but was persuaded to accept the alternative of replacing Indians with African slaves, and so the door opened to the horrendous era of New World African slavery. A debate similar to that about the Indians was held about African slavery prior to Emancipation (1834). The charter of the Royal Africa Company, which organized the English slave trade, defined slaves as “commodities.” As slavery expanded, a series of codes was constructed for the Spanish, French, and English colonies governing the status and conduct of slaves. These codes defined the slave as a chattel—literally, “a thing,” not a person. This was a problem for some churches. But in the British colonies, the Church of England, which was identified with the planters, accommodated itself to this definition without too much difficulty and made little effort to convert slaves until the eighteenth century. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 650

Categorization

• XREF: The chattel-as-thing designation is the juridical hinge that biopolitics/necropolitics readings later invert — the reduced humanity that makes disposability lawful. — connects to: Legal fictions once classified slaves as real estate and corporations as persons. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 95
• QUESTION: The Las Casas paradox (antislavery for Indians opening African slavery) is a mechanism worth tracing — how ‘humanitarian’ recognition within a racial schema re-secures exclusion elsewhere.