An Essay on the Learning of Partial, And of Future Interests in.

Montgomery, Ala., 1853. An Early Alabama Treatise on Personal Property, Including Slaves Keyes, Wade [1821-1879]. An Essay on the Learning of Partial, And of Future Interests in Chattels Personal. Montgomery, Ala.: J.H. & T.F. Martin, 1853. 160 pp. Octavo (8-3/4" x 5-1/2"). Contemporary sheep, blind fillets to boards, lettering piece and blind fillets to spine. Some rubbing to boards and extremities, spine moderately abraded, joints starting at head, offsetting to margins of endleaves, very light browning to text. Early owner signature (of Stephen F. Miller) to front pastedown, interior otherwise clean. $450. Only edition of a scarce Southern legal imprint. Keyes, the first professor of law in Alabama and among the most influential jurists in the state's antebellum development, here offers a systematic treatment of future and conditional interests in personal property. His analysis proceeds from English common-law doctrine to its American applications, expressly encompassing enslaved persons within the category of chattels-"slaves, cattle, furniture, books, victuals, money and the like"-and thus providing a stark illustration of the legal taxonomy underpinning slavery in the mid-nineteenth-century South. The work is consequently of interest not only to specialists in property law but also to scholars of slavery and its juridical framework, representing an early Alabama contribution to the literature of personal property and its more technical divisions. With the early signature of Stephen Franks Miller, likely the Georgia lawyer and legal writer, adding a modest but pertinent association within the antebellum Southern bar. Cohen, Bibliography of Early American Law 9033.…