Ned (surname not recorded)

Impact on the world

An enslaved blacksmith and mechanic in Pike County, Mississippi, Ned designed a double cotton scraper that local planters said allowed workers to do twice the work with half the horsepower of existing implements; his enslaver, attorney and planter Oscar J.E. Stuart, recognized its commercial value and petitioned the U.S. Patent Office in December 1857 to patent the device, first attempting to file in Ned's name and then, when informed an enslaved person could not take the legally required inventor's oath, in his own name as Ned's owner. The Commissioner of Patents rejected both applications, ruling that Stuart could not patent an invention he had not made, while Ned, denied recognition as a citizen, could not patent it himself — a decision that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has since cited as a landmark illustration of how the patent system was constructed to deny enslaved inventors legal ownership of their own ingenuity. Undeterred by the lack of patent protection, Stuart manufactured and sold the scraper anyway, advertising it explicitly as “the invention of a Negro slave” to rebut proslavery claims about Black intellectual capacity while denying Ned any of the resulting profit or credit; the case, along with a similar 1858 dispute involving Jefferson Davis's brother and an enslaved mechanic named Benjamin Montgomery, also profiled in this collection, helped prompt the Confederate States of America to pass a law in 1861 explicitly granting slaveholders patent rights to their enslaved workers' inventions.

Life & background

Almost nothing is recorded of Ned's life beyond his documented skill as a blacksmith and mechanic enslaved by Oscar J.E. Stuart in Pike County, Mississippi, and his 1857 invention of the double cotton scraper. His case remains one of the most thoroughly documented instances of enslaved American ingenuity and is discussed extensively in patent-law scholarship, including a 2018 Syracuse Law Review article, “Invention of a Slave,” and has been cited directly by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Sources

1. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (official statement); Smithsonian Magazine; Frye, “Invention of a Slave,” 68 Syracuse Law Review 181 (2018); The Conversation