How to Use chattel in a Sentence
chattel
noun-
And why does all this matter over 150 years after the end of chattel slavery in the U.S.?
—Jameelah Nasheed, Teen Vogue, 8 Aug. 2019
-
These days reporters in Syria are walking chattel, to be bought and sold.
—Janine Di Giovanni, Vogue, 11 May 2016
-
Still others say they have been bought and sold as chattel in a thriving, modern-day slave trade.
—Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, 25 Apr. 2017
-
Well, so too might those women who were forced against their will to function as breeding chattel.
—Jennifer Wright, Harper's BAZAAR, 13 Apr. 2018
-
Give salmon a chance to outsmart the net in the open ocean, instead of living an aquacultural-chattel life.
—Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 28 Nov. 2016
-
Pulido was certainly enslaved, but not as chattel who could be bought and sold.
—Vicente Rafael, The Atlantic, 31 May 2017
-
Instead, Twitty’s work demands that visitors look the specter of chattel slavery in the eye.
—San Francisco Chronicle, 20 Sep. 2019
-
Use of the Twitch logo on ArtifactStreams.com amounts to trademark infringement, the complaint says, while the posting of the streams themselves amounts to breach of contract, trespass to chattels, and fraud.
—Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 19 June 2019
-
Beneath the veils, though, were hardly oppressed chattel.
—Diaa Hadid, New York Times, 15 Sep. 2016
-
The insidiousness of chattel slavery, though, was still part of his life.
—NBC News, 13 Feb. 2020
-
The rebellion collapsed by 1865, and with it the institution of chattel slavery.
—Kevin Waite, The New Republic, 19 Aug. 2019
-
In the past three years, three states have changed their divorce statutes to treat pets more as family members than as mere chattel to be divided by couples, like sofas and TVs.
—Melissa Chan, Time, 22 Jan. 2020
-
When the story begins, Poornima’s mother has just died and her father, who treats her as chattel, is desperate to marry the 16-year-old off.
—Ann Levin, USA TODAY, 13 Mar. 2018
-
And less acknowledged, two centuries of ships sailing from here, financed by the Boston elite, to move human chattel and goods around the Atlantic and Caribbean.
—New York Times, 2 July 2021
-
Silver coins found previously in the area have mostly been Arab dirhams, used by Muslim merchants to pay for human chattel.
—New York Times, 12 July 2021
-
It was deployed to help justify colonial rule in Africa and chattel slavery in America.
—Amanda Kolson Hurley, WIRED, 20 Mar. 2018
-
These circumlocutions are meant to emphasize the fact that Africans traded like chattel were not, in their essence, slaves but human beings.
—Lionel Shriver, Harper's magazine, 25 Nov. 2019
-
Baltimore, a major port and shipbuilding center, was a pioneer in the coastal trade of human chattel.
—Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun, 5 May 2022
-
For the next 60 years, Douglass would make his mark on the world, becoming one of the most powerful voices against the cruel institution of chattel enslavement.
—Deneen L. Brown, Washington Post, 1 July 2023
-
Bradley was a slave, and at the time, the law considered slaves to be chattel—all of their physical and intellectual labor legally belonged to their owners.
—Erin Blakemore, National Geographic, 1 May 2017
-
Men, women, newborns, put in the bowels of ships, shackled, made to row from Africa to America, then brought here and sold like chattel, separated from their children, beat, whipped, worked to death, raped.
—Kaitlyn Huamani, Peoplemag, 24 July 2023
-
Those power dynamics continue to ebb and flow, but never again will content creators be treated as the chattel of the content owners.
—Bruce Ramer, The Hollywood Reporter, 9 Aug. 2020
-
New York companies also insured southern slave-owners against the death of their human chattel, while the city’s banks lent money for the purchase of slaves and southern plantation land.
—New York Times, 8 Jan. 2021
-
The abuse and terror of Miller’s story mirrored the horrors of chattel slavery, supposedly outlawed some 100 years before.
—Angela Helm, The Root, 28 Feb. 2018
-
These statues were put up in the first place to sanitize the history of the men who fought to maintain chattel slavery and the men who later re-established white supremacy in the old Confederacy.
—Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 17 Aug. 2017
-
In these experiments on human chattel, Sims developed a technique to repair fistula, the first of its kind.
—Daniela Blei, The Atlantic, 8 Mar. 2018
-
But like millions of black people whose ancestors were taken from Africa, chattel slavery left her with a history that can never fully be known.
—Cara Kelly, USA TODAY, 23 Dec. 2019
-
The Constitution itself was drafted to preserve the ownership of Black and Brown human beings through the chattel slave economy.
—Chase Strangio, Teen Vogue, 3 July 2018
-
Gov. Mike Stack and his wife of security details and domestic staff amid allegations the Stacks treated them like chattel.
—John Baer, Philly.com, 13 June 2017
-
The federal government offered to pay slave owners close to market rates for each of their human chattel, thereby bring slavery to an end without a resort to armed conflict.
—William Darity, Rolling Stone, 19 June 2021
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'chattel.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Last Updated: