The law said nothing about race.

It said nothing about gender.

In its formal text, it was addressed to inventors, without qualification.

But the world in which the patent system operated was the world of early American society, which was both racially enslaved and legally committed to the slavery of Black people.

Enslaved people could not hold patents because they could not hold property; the fruits of their intellectual labor, like the fruits of their physical labor, belonged to their enslavers.

Free Black people, in theory, could hold patents — but “in theory” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.