On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 20:22:23 +1000 Kathryn Andersen kat@foobox.net writes:
No, what I think was illegal about the auction is that the slaves themselves weren't legally slaves; but the pirates presumably had fake slavery papers that would pass muster, so the buyers would be able to take them home with relative impunity.
Just to throw out the odds and ends I've picked up about slavery -
There were states owned by the state, privately owned slaves, slaves whose position was hereditary, slaves whose condition was a punishment, slaves with rights, slaves with power, slaves with none of the above, slaves who weren't legally recognized as slaves (people in debt bondage, for example), and probably other variations.
There have been several areas that had a mixed bag. In the U.S., there were laws against _importing_ slaves dating from the early 19th century. Technically, smuggling slaves in was punishable by death (although I understand there was only one case on record of this punishment being given, the fact that it was the law had some impact on the Amistad trial). Descent, at least under law, was a critical element.
In the American southwest, settlers from free states bought children from local Indians once it became known that the children were likely to be killed otherwise (selling a child was often the alternative to infanticide or letting them die of slow starvation) but they were also known to drive out or arrest slavers from nearby Mexico.
Some cultures allowed a person to become a slave for cause (criminal offenses, being captured in war, etc) but recognized their children as free.
While Mosaic law allowed for slavery under certain conditions, stealing someone to sell was punishable by death and escaped slaves had legal protections.
Some places would prosecute for the murder of a slave. Others allowed it as public entertainment. Among one group of Indians, only a slave could marry a royal (of course, they were to be sacrificed when the royal died, but still).
Serfdom was a type of slavery with certain rights attached - a serf couldn't be sold away from his or her home, their marriages were recognized, they had certain rights of ownership, their children usually had rights of inheritance, etc.
Most other types of slaves _didn't_ have inheritance rights - but not always. In some cultures, the child of a slave woman and a free man was free if acknowledged. In others, the mother had to be free. In some, it didn't matter because slavery wasn't hereditary.
There were indentured servants and other types of slaves for a fixed period of time. Also, debt slavery's been mentioned. It could be formal - a person was sold to pay debts - or informal - a person was legally free but was legally (or otherwise [debt slavery may be illegal but people feel social or other pressures]) bound to work to pay off debts (that never seemed to go away).
Confused yet?
OK, onto the Federation.
Some slaves were definitely state owned. It seems safe to assume the mine workers, for example, were. We know slavery existed as a legal punishment. We _don't_ know if it was hereditary, but it would be a good guess. Federation citizenship seems based on a mixture of inherited status and actual performance or ability. A Federation slave probably varied from a Delta in that Deltas still had certain citizen rights whereas a slaves legal protections were probably limited to the same kind of protection property has.
Anyway, a slave's child probably had no claim to citizen rights. In their case, being born free (assuming they were) might have translated as having no protections whatsoever and a pretty heavy pressure for them to give up the free status one way or another. Possibly a bond slave was a slave's 'freeborn' child forced to formally accept being bound over as a slave, which might have placed them higher than people enslaved for 'criminal' acts.
If such slaves were ultimately considered property of the state, whether or not a particular citizen had paid a fee for rights to the slave's labor, an owner might have had no power to free a slave.
Anyhow, the slave auction probably was illegal since, however slavery was conducted in the Federation, this wasn't it. These were 'stolen' people as opposed to 'legally acquired' ones.
I suppose it's also remotely possible that the Federation, either under Servalan or her successors, had altered laws to make slavery more difficult. In Servalan's case, if I were to say something other than the milk of human kindness, the Federation had suffered devastating losses in the war, in people as well as territory. Amnesties or improving the condition of the people left might have had various political or PR advantages. The new regime could have had similar motives - improving conditions for its core area population while becoming more brutal on the frontier.
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