Partus sequitur ventrum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Partus sequitur ventrum, often abbreviated to 'partus', was a legal doctrine relating to slavery in the United States. It held that the status of a child was based on that of his or her mother. The Latin phrase literally means "that which is brought forth follows the womb" [1].
Prior to the adoption of this doctrine, common law had held that a child's status was inherited from its father - only livestock inherited status through the mother. Thus it could be said to have "set a psychological basis for popular culture’s seeing slaves as less than fully human" [2] - or at least to be an obvious symptom of this view.
The doctrine meant that slave-owners were not required to emancipate or acknowledge their illegitimate children by their slaves, and that people whose ancestry was primarily European, and whose appearance may have been indistinguishable from that of free whites, could be slaves. Legally such people were mulattos.
Sexual slavery was apparently widespread throughout the slave-owning South. Southern diarist Mary Chesnut famously wrote that "This only I see: like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives their concubines, the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children -- every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in every body's household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think..." [3]
The doctrine ended with the abolition of slavery in the United States.
