Can Christians be slaves?
The so-called Joint Opinion was, in fact, not law, but an informal opinion produced by two eminent legal officials under the influence of much food and drink and the convivial pressures of a group of West Indian planters. These economic interests lobbied the key legal minds to undercut two popular ideas that had been threatening the slave economies of the British Empire. One idea was religious: that baptism automatically conferred freedom on slaves. The Hebrew Scriptures had set a kind of precedent. In Leviticus, the Lord had instructed the children of Israel not to enslave one another, but to buy the children of the strangers that sojourned around them. Some people applied this to the Christian nations of Europe and claimed that Christians could not enslave Christians. The heathen, on the other hand, were fair game. But what if those heathen became Christians? Despite the fact that English courts had never actually freed a baptized slave, most blacks and many whites believed that bapt