"Invention of a Slave": the Attorney General closes the Patent Office to enslaved inventors (Washington, DC / Pike County, MS, 1857–58)

SUMMARY"Invention of a Slave": the Attorney General closes the Patent Office to enslaved inventors (Washington, DC / Pike County, MS, 1857–58) [Connections: Tech & skilled labor, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDOscar J. E. Stuart, a Mississippi planter and lawyer, tried to patent a double plow and scraper invented by Ned, an enslaved blacksmith he owned. Commissioner of Patents Joseph Holt refused the application. The refusals are in Holt's letters to Stuart (24 Nov. 1857) and to Interior Secretary Jacob Thompson (12 Dec. 1857), reprinted in Frye, 68 Syracuse L. Rev. 181, 194–95 (2018). Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black agreed in a three-sentence opinion: "a machine invented by a slave, though it be new and useful, cannot, in the present state of the law, be patented." The reasoning had two parts. First, the enslaved inventor could not swear the oath the Patent Act of 1836 required. Second, the owner could not take the patent because only the "original and first inventor" could. Stuart wrote to Senator John Quitman that "the master has the same right to the fruits of the labor of the intilect [sic] of his slave," and asked "couldn't the law be changed?" Stuart then opened a factory in Summit, MS (1860), and sold the tool as "the Stuart Double Plow and Double Scraper, an invention of a negro slave."
STATUS: Ned is enslaved (per Stuart's own patent application and letters; he was inherited from Stuart's late wife's estate). Stuart is a free enslaver

PATTERNThe government named the real inventor, refused him the patent, and the owner still sold the invention for profit under his own name

LENS (WW9)The record says the tech was ours. The paper simply refused to let the maker own it

OPENNed's full name and later life; Stuart's factory sales; the full text of Holt's letters (in Frye)

DISPUTEDWikipedia's "Patent racism" article says the 1858 ruling barred free Black Americans as well. Swanson's reading of the opinion is that it addressed enslaved inventors, and that non-citizens could still apply by swearing "of what country he is a citizen." Free Black inventors did receive patents before and after 1858 (see Jennings, Blair, Rillieux below). Needs deep research into how the Patent Office treated free Black applicants after Dred Scott

SOURCEKara W. Swanson, "Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on Invention of a Slave," Columbia Law Review 120:4 (2020); HistoryNet, "Whose Patent Is It?". Primary: Invention of a Slave, 9 Op. Att'y Gen. 171 (1858); Holt letters of 24 Nov. and 12 Dec. 1857; Stuart to Quitman (cited in Janet Sharp Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream, 1981).