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This chapter examines how judges determined the character of slaves. In the South, the adaptation of Lockean notions of personal identity to slaves was inextricably bound up with the understanding of person as a forensic term and the kind of legal incapacity and nonrecognition that signaled negative personhood. Thomas Morris in Southern Slavery and the Law: 1619–1860 argues that the most crucial legal fiction was that “the slave was an object of property rights, he or she was a ‘thing’.” However, what most occupied the thoughts of lawyers and judges in cases about personal rights in the courts of Virginia on the eve of the civil war was not to affirm the slave as property, but to articulate the personhood of slaves in such a way that it was disfigured, not erased. Slave law depended on this juridical diminution. The peculiar form impairment took and the transformations that ensued gave new meaning to degradation.

Through a close examination of British Caribbean slave laws, this chapter argues that British Caribbean slave law always recognized the humanity of the slave, and the law’s power derived from its ability to see Africans’ humanity and effectively disable it. Slave law suspended Africans and their descendants between the human and the animal through disability-inducing laws. The principle of maternal inheritance was a legal notion that positioned enslaved women as legally equivalent to animals. The slave codes of Barbados and Jamaica disabled enslaved Africans by limiting their mobility, freedom, and autonomy, and by divesting them of political status. The codes encouraged the physical impairment and disfigurement of captives by sanctioning punishments that disabled and disfigured as well as by establishing a culture in which whites could punish captives with impunity in whatever way they desired.

Like other slave-owning societies, Romans were extremely anxious about slaves illegally escaping their condition. This fear is evident in their laws and literature, and derived from Roman social norms and expectations. Fugitive slaves undermined the new imperial order established by Augustus, and blurred the dichotomy between slaves and free people. The Roman state expended considerable energy into stopping slave flight, with an unusually high level of coordination between different levels of government and police authority (emperors, senate, governors, local magistrates, landowners, civilian police, public slaves, harbour guards, out-posted soldiers). The main legal source for this assertion, Digesta 11.4, is tested against other types of evidence (papyri, Latin novels, the Saepinum inscription).

Harriet Beecher Stowe, a woman who disliked confrontations, who rode over unpleasantness with optimistic goodwill and turned aside anger with humor, found herself, as public opinion brewed over the Fugitive Slave Law, consumed with a rage unlike anything she had ever experienced. Her intense feelings were the more oppressive for having no outlet. Men made the laws and shaped the public opinion of the land, and women who found themselves morally repelled by their work had little recourse. Women engaged in rather extraordinary acts of civil disobedience, provoked by laws that they themselves had had no part in making. As the temperance crusade moved from the podium to the ballot box with the passage of the first legal constraint on the liquor trade, the “Maine Law” of 1851, women who had been active in temperance societies keenly felt their disfranchisement.

Chapter 1 begins with the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 and follows the aftermath of the English invasion of Jamaica. It documents how Jamaica’s unique geopolitical circumstances in the English Atlantic empire intersected with the doctrine of prerogative governance, giving rise to the development of both slave law and local statutory racial classifications. Provincial racial categories allowed for the social stigmatization, political subjugation, and economic exploitation of marginalized segments of Jamaica’s free population.

This chapter examines how the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law politicized the fugitive slave issue on a national scale. With the sectional conflict increasing, and the fugitive slave issue at the heart of compromises designed to resolve it, local newspapers began covering fugitive slave cases extensively, creating a new body of evidence just as the local Underground Railroad was becoming more secretive due to legal liabilities. Fugitive slave cases that previously would have only received limited local attention now might be publicized across the North and South. In Congress, Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator James Cooper gave important speeches on the Compromise. In southern Pennsylvania, this process as well as the 1840s legal struggle over fugitive slaves culminated in the Christiana riot and the resulting treason trials of William Parker and Christian Hanway, which helped unseat a sitting governor and almost caused sectional rupture.

This chapter examines how enslaved Bostonians appropriated white institutions and discourse to better their everyday lives. They channeled much of their energy into learning and using local institutions, namely the law and Boston’s many Protestant churches in order to obtain valuable skills like reading and writing to acquire a basic understanding of Anglo-American jurisprudence. White Bostonians never created specialized mechanisms of control, like slave courts as a means to govern slavery, and slaves actively worked to engrain themselves in local institutions. On any given Sunday, the pews of Boston’s churches were full of black faces. They were learning the gospel and with it the skills to read and write. And slaves knew to approach local justices if their masters were cruel or abusive. Usually they would receive a fair hearing. Comprehending their larger society and understanding its basic contours enabled enslaved Bostonians to navigate their enslavement and fight for concessions from the master class.

This chapter argues that disability was central to the production of racialized medical knowledge in the antebellum years. As white southern physicians professionalized, they constructed racial discourses that dovetailed with disabling legal fictions of blackness. The criminal, property, and manumission laws of slavery analogized blackness and disability by overemphasizing the state of enslaved people’s bodies, while slave codes metaphorically “handicapped” blacks in society through pass laws, literacy laws, and the denial of citizenship rights. Samuel Cartwright, Josiah Nott, and others borrowed from this legal lexicon and invented new conditions and theories of black abnormality. Enslaved women, sexuality, reproductive health, and the imagined link between hereditary defects and racial inferiority played a major role in these conversations and positioned physicians as “experts” of black bodies.

Historians have long noted that a defining feature of Spanish imperial slave law was the right slaves possessed to sue their masters. This chapter historicizes that right in the civil sphere, and dates it to the advent of new jurisprudential ideas and slaves’ increased legal activity beginning in the mid-1700s. Enslaved litigants began to appeal to royal courts over new types of cases, including the right to self-purchase, as well as to reinterpret older codified laws on conditional liberty and owner abuse. In these suits, they began to use the fact that owners implicitly recognized slaves’ civil subjectivity in the arrangements they often made with them to present slavery as a stage rather than a permanent condition. In going to court and arguing that their search for freedom was in fact a movement toward moral good, they advanced a modern notion of human agency in line with that of many Enlightenment philosophers.

This chapter focuses on Thomas L. Kane's work in relation to the Fugitive Slave Law. It explains that Kane resigned as judicial clerk upon the passage of the law because it required him as a U.S. commissioner to perform a central role in capturing and extraditing fugitive slaves. It discusses the conflict Kane's resignation caused between him and his father, John Kane, and suggests that this conflict illustrates the divide within the northern Democratic Party over slavery.

This chapter explores the extent, meaning, and impact of enslaved African-American flight during the era of the American Revolution. Its temporal boundaries range roughly from 1763, the onset of Revolutionary activities and discourses, to state-level “First Emancipation,” to the last act of Gradual Emancipation in New Jersey in 1804. Geographically, the article covers the Atlantic seaboard colonies and later states. The chapter argues that black self-emancipation via flight—including individual actions but also the mass movements of the Revolutionary Black Loyalists—was the single greatest method for enslaved people to gain freedom in this rapidly changing political landscape. Slave flight indeed had a profound impact on that landscape and affected American construction of slave laws during the Revolutionary Era.

This chapter describes Cecelia's trip to Niagara Falls with Fanny and explains her decision to escape from slavery. It examines the legal, social, familial, and personal circumstances that influenced her thinking. It also discusses Fanny's mindset as Cecelia's owner.

Chapter forty-nine examines Hodge’s early engagement in the events surround the beginning of the Civil War. Hodge was strongly pro-Union, and wrote early about the need to keep the Union intact. In this effort, he wrote one of his most famous and widely read Repertory articles: “The State of the Country.” Once it became clear that Lincoln’s election would lead to succession, Hodge attempted to keep Southern and Northern Old School Presbyterians united. This effort also failed as James Thornwell and Benjamin Morgan Palmer led Southern Old School Presbyterians to form their own denomination. Hodge had little sympathy for the South, who he saw unlawfully seceding as it turned its back on the Constitution, but he worked hard to attempt to avoid the breakup of the Union.

This chapter describes the open and successful defiance of the Oberlinites towards federal authority and the Fugitive Slave Law, and their manipulation of the rescue episode into a triumphant propaganda. In Ohio and across the North, the flagging Republican Party embraced the Oberlin Rescuers, and in the process, the resulting injection of radicalism helped rescue the party from its drift toward conservatism and directed it down the path that would ultimately lead to a national policy of emancipation.

Chapter forty-eight examines Hodge’s politics and his tripartite commitment to God’s sovereignty, property rights and the need for religion to be tied to political action for the good of the nation. Through an examination of Hodge’s Repertory review of Moses Stuart’s Conscience and the Constitution, one finds that Hodge had a firm commitment to believing that humanity’s common moral sense would bind the nation together. This belief was unsettled by the Civil War. Hodge also shifted political party allegiances during this life from the Whig party to the Republican party, but he always considered himself a Federalist at heart.

This paper concerns systematic practices by public officials that are clearly unlawful, not hidden from view, and tolerated for many years. Such a “legal entrenchment of illegality” characterized America’s Jim Crow period, from the 1890s to the 1960s, especially in the former slave states, where the rape, assault, and murder of African Americans, police brutality, procedural bias, and anti‐black pogroms were tolerated or engaged in by officials. The related cynicism of officials is illustrated by a review of Supreme Court decisions that undermined the legal framework for the post‐Civil War “reconstruction” of the former slave states. This paper also shows how the legal entrenchment of illegality required officials to embrace an incoherent and unstable set of attitudes towards law, which was incompatible with Hart’s legal theory as originally presented, but was compatible with its final form.

This chapter locates the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia in 1619 with the Atlantic context of the first phase of the slave trade, during which the trade was dominated by the Spanish and Portuguese. It first explores how and why English colonists sought to revive the institution of slavery that had become largely moribund in England. They did so primarily by borrowing ideas and economic frameworks from the Spanish-American system of African enslavement. The chapter then locates the Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 within the broad contours of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade. These first Afro-Virginians were captured from a Portuguese slaving vessel, and the particular patterns of African embarkation in the Portuguese trade during these years had critical implications for their attitudes, experiences, and opportunities once they arrived in the Chesapeake. The chapter argues that 1619 is best understood as merely part of a broader process through which the Iberian Atlantic system of African slavery came to be adopted and adapted by English colonists in the Americas.

This chapter offers a grand tour of French court procedures as applied to the enslaved in French Louisiana, in order to frame the analysis of slave testimony. Using particular court cases to flesh out the application of the law in the colony, it discusses the role of slave codes against the backdrop of French colonial laws and judicial procedure, which dictated in minute detail how crimes were investigated, prosecuted, sentenced, and, especially, how testimony was heard, transcribed, and recorded in the archive.