TEI Header

File Description

Title Statement

Title

Opinions Of Several Gentlemen Of The Law, On The Subject Of Negro Servitude, In The Province Of Nova-Scotia: A Digital Edition

Author

Uncredited Compiler

William Tidd

Joseph Applin

Spencer Percival

Sir Edward Law (the Attorney General)

Principal

David Badke

Responsibility

Creation of machine readable text by David Badke and Kerry Mogg

Header creation by David Badke

Encoded by David Badke

Edition Statement

First TEI encoded edition

Publication Statement

Publisher

University of Victoria

Place

Victoria, British Columbia

Date

August 1, 2004

Availability

Copyright 2004 by David Badke. This text is freely available for non-commercial use provided the text is distributed with the header information provided.

Notes Statement

Published in 1802, Opinions of Several Gentlemen of the Law, on the Subject of Negro Servitude, in the Province of Nova Scotia, is a small surviving piece of the history of slavery in Canada. Dispensing with a discourse on the morality of slavery, the document merely attempts to answer questions regarding the legality of "Trover" (a legal term inherently defining a slave as property) in one single case in Annapolis, Nova Scotia. The pamphlet is concerned with a dispute between a Colonel James Delancey, a slave owner, and his slave, Jack. The latter, having run away "without leave" to a location outside of Annapolis, found paid employment with a Mr. Wooden. Under the advice of his laywer, Wooden refused to return Jack to James Delancey on the basis of Jack's status in Nova Scotia as a "Freeman." Due to the legal ambiguity of slavery-- or "servitude"-- in Nova Scotia at this time, the pamphlet is intended to show the problems arrising from this ambiguity when attempting to define "Trover". Moreover the pamphlet seeks to address whether by the fact of being black, or "negro", there is legal precedent in the Colonial acts of parliament to define all blacks as those confined to a life of "servitude." [Kerry Mogg, July 2004]

Source Description

Title

Opinions Of Several Gentlemen Of The Law, On The Subject Of Negro Servitude, In The Province Of Nova-Scotia

Author

Uncredited Compiler

William Tidd

Joseph Applin

Spencer Percival

Sir Edward Law (the Attorney General)

Publisher

John Ryan, Printer To The King's Most Excellent Majesty

Place

No. 9, Long-Wharf, South Side Market Slip, St. John, Nova Scotia

Date

1802

Note The copy of the pamphlet that was digitized is housed in Special Collections, McPherson Library, University of Victoria. The library call number is HT1056 N606.

Encoding Description

Project The encoded document is an offshoot of a summer work project conducted by the Special Collections department, McPherson Library, University of Victoria to digitize the printed text.
Editorial: Normalization The long 's' character used in the printed text has been silently normalized to the modern small 's'. Ligatures found in the printed text have not been retained. The spelling from the original text has been retained.
Editorial: Quotation Single quotation marks (apostrophe) have been retained. Double quotation marks have been replaced with markup (the [q] tag). Where the opening quotation mark was repeated at the start of each printed line, the extra marks have been silently deleted.
Editorial: Standard Values Dates marked with the [date] tag have a [value] attribute with the ISO standard yyyy-mm-dd date.
Editorial: Interpretation Biographical, terminological and editorial notes added in the [back] section. These are linked to tagged names via the [key] attribute and to tagged references via the [target] attribute. All tagged personal names have been expanded (where known) and regularized in the [reg] attribute.
Tag usage

[hi] Used with [rend] attribute of 'italic' to mark non-emphasized English words italicized in the copy text. Used with [rend] attribute of 'smallcap' to mark English words printed in small capitals in the copy text.

[foreign] Used to mark Latin legal terms.

[emph] Used to mark words and phrases emphasized with italics in the copy text.

Classes

[lcsh] Library of Congress Subject Headings

[lc] Library of Congress Classification

Profile Description

Language usage

[en] Canadian English, 19th century, legal

[la] Latin legal terms

Keywords

Slavery--Law and legislation--Nova Scotia.

Blacks--Nova Scotia--History.

Class code

[lc] HT1056 N606

Revision Description

Change 1

Date

August 8, 2004

Responsibility

David Badke

Items

First public release on the Web.