This volume is the first comprehensive history of the evolving relationship between American slavery and the law from colonial times to the Civil War. As Thomas Morris clearly shows, racial slavery came to the English colonies as an institution without strict legal definitions or guidelines. Specifically, he demonstrates that there was no coherent body of law that dealt solely with slaves. Instead, more general legal rules concerning inheritance, mortgages, and transfers of property coexisted with laws pertaining only to slaves. According to Morris, southern lawmakers and judges struggled to reconcile a social order based on slavery with existing English common law (or, in Louisiana, with continental civil law.) Because much was left to local interpretation, laws varied between and even within states. In addition, legal doctrine often differed from local practice. And, as Morris reveals, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, tensions mounted between the legal culture of racial slavery and the competing demands of capitalism and evangelical Christianity.

Tying together legal, historical, social, political and literary strands to show how the law itself was implicated in the persistence of slavery, this work sheds new light on slavery and Southern history, as it probes the conscience of a troubled jurist incapable of fully transcending his times.

Examines the Impact of the Idealism of the Personal Liberty Laws of Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin The Personal Liberty Laws reflected the social ethical commitment to freedom from slavery and as such were among the bricks that laid the foundation for the Fourteenth Amendment. Morris examines those statutes as enacted in the five representative states Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin, and argues that these laws were an alternative to the violence allowed by the southern slave codes and the extreme abolitionist viewpoints of the north. Thomas D. Morris [1938-] taught in the Department of History, Portland State University and is the author of Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. CONTENTS I. Slavery and Emancipation: the Rise of Conflicting Legal Systems II. Kidnapping and Fugitives: Early State and Federal Responses III. State "Interposition" 1820-1830: Pennsylvania and New York IV. Assaults Upon the Personal Liberty Laws V. The Antislavery Counterattack VI. The Personal Liberty Laws in the Supreme Court: Prigg v. Pennsylvania VII. The Pursuit of a Containment Policy, 1842-1850 VII. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 IX. Positive Law, Higher Law, and the Via Media X. Interposition, 1854-1858 XI. Habeas Corpus and Total Repudiation 1859-1860 XII. Denouement Appendix Bibliography Index

Between 1854 and 1864, more than a hundred free African Americans in Virginia proposed to enslave themselves and, in some cases, their children. Ted Maris-Wolf explains this phenomenon as a response to state legislation that forced free African Americans to make a terrible choice: leave enslaved loved ones behind for freedom elsewhere or seek a way to remain in their communities, even by renouncing legal freedom. Maris-Wolf paints an intimate portrait of these people whose lives, liberty, and use of Virginia law offer new understandings of race and place in the upper South. Maris-Wolf shows how free African Americans quietly challenged prevailing notions of racial restriction and exclusion, weaving themselves into the social and economic fabric of their neighborhoods and claiming, through unconventional or counterintuitive means, certain basic rights of residency and family. Employing records from nearly every Virginia county, he pieces together the remarkable lives of Watkins Love, Jane Payne, and other African Americans who made themselves essential parts of their communities and, in some cases, gave up their legal freedom in order to maintain family and community ties.

This book examines emancipation after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Focusing on the making and meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. The book tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and reveals an unprecedented transformation in American race relations, politics, and constitutional thought. Using a wide array of archival and published sources, Professor Vorenberg argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation occurred after, not before, the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by prior historians; and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.