Born a slave

Born a slave is an archaic stock phrase that was commonly used to describe people born enslaved under the system of chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere but eventually granted legal personhood, either through escape, lawsuit, manumission, or mass emancipation.

No man could enslave his soul, though one might have title to his body...Richard Allen was one of God's princes, noble in thought and great in action.

But within him was a soul that while living expressed itself by the Heaven-born Maid of Melody and charmed thousands of people during his lifetime, white and black alike; a soul that during life created sentiment for the Negro on earth, and one that will live in a world without end.

"[2] In a contemporary guide to writing about slavery, the NAACP of Culpeper, Virginia, advises: "No one was 'born a slave'; instead people were born with 'free' or 'slave' status" conferred upon them involuntarily.

Come, Liberty, thou cheerful sound, Roll through my ravished ears; Come, let my grief in joys be drowned, And drive away my fears."

Arthur Crumpler, a formerly enslaved blacksmith born in Virginia, who had worked for the US Army as a contraband during the American Civil War and experienced wage theft because he could not read, was attending night school in Boston in 1898
Memoir of Pierre Toussaint : Born a Slave In St. Domingo (1854) is a slave narrative that uses the phrase born a slave as part of the title.