Chancellor v. Milly

The Chief Justice

delivered the Opinion of the Court.

Milly, apparently a white woman, about forty years old, and who had been treated as a slave from her birth, brought an action of trespass against Chancellor, who held and claimed her as his property.

*24Upon the trial, on an appropriate issue for trying her claim to freedom, she was exhibited before the jury for their inspection; and thereupon, Chancellor, in order to repel any presumption arising in her favor from her color, offered to prove that, in the family in which she was born and reared from infancy, she had ever been called and reputed…