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Plantation Heiress Fiction, Slavery, and the Properties of White Marriage

Jeffory A. Clymer

in Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 3 considers how the color line shaped disputes over the economic position of women within marriage between whites. In books featuring the travails of white plantation heiresses, novelist E. ... More

Chapter 3 considers how the color line shaped disputes over the economic position of women within marriage between whites. In books featuring the travails of white plantation heiresses, novelist E. D. E. N. Southworth borrows from slave law and from the rumblings of slavery’s most passionate defenders to map marriage’s social and financial dilemmas for white women. She transposes the effects of famous legal decisions, such as State v. Mann (North Carolina, 1829), as well as the vocabulary and logic produced by writers like George Fitzhugh. Southworth manipulates the ironies, violence, and ideological blind spots in the slave South’s conflation of “affection” and “possession.” As Southworth imagines white wives’ property rights as a remedy for the abuse that marriage could conceal, she transforms the enslaved into a ready-at-hand plot device for carving out white wives’ new economic rights.Less

1829: Writing State v. Mann

in A Community Built on Words: The Constitution in History and Politics

Next to the infamous Dred Scott case, State v. Mann is probably the best known American judicial decision involving the institution of slavery. The decision's prominence during the antebellum period ... More

Next to the infamous Dred Scott case, State v. Mann is probably the best known American judicial decision involving the institution of slavery. The decision's prominence during the antebellum period was due in part to the fact that the author of the North Carolina Supreme Court's opinion, Thomas Ruffin, was a judge with a national reputation. Beginning at an early point, however, Ruffin's opinion in Mann began to attract attention for its language and what that language revealed about slavery as well as the author. Ruffin did not achieve these effects without effort. By chance three drafts of his opinion survive, and a comparison of them sheds important light on the final product and on Ruffin's thinking about the place of slavery in an American constitutional order.Less

Beyond State v. Mann Thomas Ruffin’s Jurisprudence

Alfred L. Brophy

in University, Court, and Slave: Proslavery Academic Thought and Southern Jurisprudence, 1831–1861

“Beyond State v. Mann” builds on the previous chapter to evaluate how Justice Thomas Ruffin of the North Carolina Supreme Court decided cases involving slaves and sometimes other people. It shows ... More

“Beyond State v. Mann” builds on the previous chapter to evaluate how Justice Thomas Ruffin of the North Carolina Supreme Court decided cases involving slaves and sometimes other people. It shows that Ruffin’s cold calculations of utility, which were central to State v. Mann, extended to cases involving torts by slaves and attempted emancipation of slaves, as well as family law and workers. This reveals that Ruffin’s jurisprudence protected property rights and took into consideration the economic effects of his decisions. This links Ruffin to the reasoning styles of southern academics as well. Together they promoted a world of property, slavery, and economic efficiency.Less

Claiming, Killing, and Haunting in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Sarah Gilbreath Ford

in Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic

This chapter examines Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). In reading Sethe’s impossible choice between ending her children’s lives or letting them be taken back into slavery, critics have largely blamed ... More

This chapter examines Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). In reading Sethe’s impossible choice between ending her children’s lives or letting them be taken back into slavery, critics have largely blamed her daughter’s death on the system of slavery. That critics do not want to blame Sethe for the murder is understandable, given how much she suffers under slavery. What these critics miss, however, is Sethe’s agency. In killing Beloved and attempting to kill the rest of her children, Sethe makes a property claim that speaks directly to the history of cases on American property law and slavery. This chapter examines Sethe’s choice in the context of State v. Mann and Pierson v. Post, arguing that her willingness to destroy makes her a valid property owner. Her legal possession, however, is answered by spectral possession when Beloved haunts to reclaim personhood.Less

Conclusion

in A Community Built on Words: The Constitution in History and Politics

The idea that a political community can be built on words is, from many perspectives, chimerical or even farcical. Mao Tse-tung wrote that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and the ... More

The idea that a political community can be built on words is, from many perspectives, chimerical or even farcical. Mao Tse-tung wrote that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and the history of the American Republic could supply abundant evidence for his dictum, from the Revolutionary War that made the Republic possible on. The maintenance of the constitutional Union itself during the crisis of 1860 to 1865 was the product of a bloody civil war, and many provisions of the Constitution's text are a reminder that this was no aberration, that as law the Constitution rests ultimately on the willingness of men and women to enforce it by violent means. State v. Mann and Korematsu v. United States bear witness to the fact that Americans are no more immune than any other human beings from the temptation to refuse to talk, to exclude others from what Doctorow called the “community of discourse.”Less

The Novelist and the Jurist: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Jurisprudence of Sentiment

Alfred L. Brophy

in University, Court, and Slave: Proslavery Academic Thought and Southern Jurisprudence, 1831–1861

Where proslavery Southerners had focused on the utility of slavery in arguing for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, antislavery writers responded that considerations of utility needed to take into ... More

Where proslavery Southerners had focused on the utility of slavery in arguing for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, antislavery writers responded that considerations of utility needed to take into account the lives of enslaved people and that a “jurisprudence of sentiment” should replace such cold calculations of utility to slave owners. Harriet Beecher Stowe presented an alternative “jurisprudence of sentiment” in her 1856 novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. The novel uses the 1830 case of State v. Mann by Justice Thomas Ruffin, which allowed an abuser of a slave to escape liability. Stowe’s judge issued a proslavery decision, even while he was antislavery in private. The judge was constrained by law to issue the decision and, thus, Stowe set up a conflict between law and morality. Although she was opposed to it, Stowe confirmed the centrality of economic reasoning about slavery to southern law.Less

1862: Four Attorneys General and the Meaning of Citizenship

in A Community Built on Words: The Constitution in History and Politics

The issue of whether African Americans were to be counted as members of the body politic that Judge Ruffin raised suggestively through his language in State v. Mann was squarely addressed by his ... More

The issue of whether African Americans were to be counted as members of the body politic that Judge Ruffin raised suggestively through his language in State v. Mann was squarely addressed by his contemporaries in a variety of settings, not least in a series of opinions by federal attorneys general stretching from eight years before Mann until a month before the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1821, Attorney General William Wirt received a request for advice from the secretary of the treasury, William Crawford, acting on behalf of the collector of customs at Norfolk, Virginia. Federal law mandated that the master of an American-flag vessel be a “citizen of the United States,” and Crawford's inquiry was whether a free African American resident in Virginia satisfied this requirement. Wirt began his opinion by assuming that Congress had intended its statutory use of the expression to carry the same meaning as in the Constitution.Less