Download or read book Slave Law in the Americas written by Alan Watson and published by . This book was released on 2012-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Alan Watson argues that the slave laws of North and South America--the written codes defining the relationship of masters to slaves--reflect not so much the culture and society of the various colonies but the legal traditions of England, Europe, and ancient Rome. A pathbreaking study concerned as much with the nature of comparative law as the specific subject of the law of slavery, Slave Law in the Americas posits an essential distance in the Western legal tradition between the tenets of law and the values of the society they govern. Laws, Watson shows, often are made not by governments or rulers but by jurists as in ancient Rome, law professors as in medieval and continental Europe, and judges as in common law England. Bodies of law, often created without reference to particular social and political ideals, are also often transferred whole cloth from one society to another. Tracing the effects of the reception of Roman law throughout Europe (excluding England) and the Americas, Watson reveals the enormous impact of this legal tradition on subsequent lawmakers operating under utterly dissimilar social and political conditions in the New World. Slave law in the colonies, Watson demonstrates, had much to do with the mother country's relations to Roman law. Spain, Portugal, France, and the United Dutch Provinces, all within the Roman legal tradition, imposed on their colonies slave laws that were private and nonracist in character, laws that interfered little in master-slave relations and provided for the relative ease of manumission and the grant of citizenship to freed slaves. England, however, did not ascribe to Roman law and colonists created rather than received slave law. Public and racist, slave law in the English colonies uniquely reflected local concerns, involving every citizen in the protection and perpetuation of slavery, strictly regulating education, manumission, and citizenship status. "Comparative legal history," Watson writes, "is in its infancy." Presenting the laws of slavery in ancient Rome and in the slaveholding colonies of America, Watson demonstrates how comparative law can elucidate the relationship of law, legal rules, and institutions to the society in which they operate. Investigating not the dynamics of slavery but of slave law, he reveals the working of a legal culture and its peculiar history.
Download or read book Slave Law in the American South written by Mark V. Tushnet and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Slave Law in the Americas written by Alan Watson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Alan Watson argues that the slave laws of North and South America--the written codes defining the relationship of masters to slaves--reflect not so much the culture and society of the various colonies but the legal traditions of England, Europe, and ancient Rome. A pathbreaking study concerned as much with the nature of comparative law as the specific subject of the law of slavery, Slave Law in the Americas posits an essential distance in the Western legal tradition between the tenets of law and the values of the society they govern. Laws, Watson shows, often are made not by governments or rulers but by jurists as in ancient Rome, law professors as in medieval and continental Europe, and judges as in common law England. Bodies of law, often created without reference to particular social and political ideals, are also often transferred whole cloth from one society to another. Tracing the effects of the reception of Roman law throughout Europe (excluding England) and the Americas, Watson reveals the enormous impact of this legal tradition on subsequent lawmakers operating under utterly dissimilar social and political conditions in the New World. Slave law in the colonies, Watson demonstrates, had much to do with the mother country's relations to Roman law. Spain, Portugal, France, and the United Dutch Provinces, all within the Roman legal tradition, imposed on their colonies slave laws that were private and nonracist in character, laws that interfered little in master-slave relations and provided for the relative ease of manumission and the grant of citizenship to freed slaves. England, however, did not ascribe to Roman law and colonists created rather than received slave law. Public and racist, slave law in the English colonies uniquely reflected local concerns, involving every citizen in the protection and perpetuation of slavery, strictly regulating education, manumission, and citizenship status. "Comparative legal history," Watson writes, "is in its infancy." Presenting the laws of slavery in ancient Rome and in the slaveholding colonies of America, Watson demonstrates how comparative law can elucidate the relationship of law, legal rules, and institutions to the society in which they operate. Investigating not the dynamics of slavery but of slave law, he reveals the working of a legal culture and its peculiar history.
Download or read book Southern Slavery and the Law 1619 1860 written by Thomas D. Morris and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-01-21 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The American Law of Slavery 1810 1860 written by Mark Tushnet and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an examination of Southern slave law between 1810 and 1860, Mark Tushnet reveals a structured dichotomy between slave labor systems and bourgeois systems of production. Whereas the former rest on the total dominion of the master over the slave and necessitate a concern for the slave's humanity, the latter rest of the purchase by the capitalist of a worker's labor power only and are concerned primarily with economic interest. Focusing on a wide range of issues that include contract and accident law as well as criminal law and the law of manumission, he shows how Southern slave law had to respond to the competing pressures of humanity and interest. Beginning with a critical evaluation of slave law, the author develops the conceptual framework for his own perspective on the legal system, drawing on the works of Marx and Weber. He then examines four appellate court cases decided in three different states, from civil-law Louisiana to commonlaw North Carolina, at widely separated times, from 1818 to 1858. Professor Tushnet finds that the cases display a continuing but never wholly successful attempt at distinguish between law and sentiment as modes of regulating social interactions involving slaves. Also, the cases show that the primary method of accommodating law and sentiment was an attempt to use rigid categories to confine the law of slavery to what was thought its proper sphere. Mark Tushnet is Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Slave Laws in Virginia written by Philip J. Schwarz and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five essays in Slave Laws in Virginia explore two centuries of the ever-changing relationship between a major slave society and the laws that guided it. The topics covered are diverse, including the African judicial background of African American slaves, Thomas Jefferson's relationship with the laws of slavery, the capital punishment of slaves, nineteenth-century penal transportation of slaves from Virginia as related to the interstate slave trade and the changing market for slaves, and Virginia's experience with its own fugitive slave laws. Through the history of one large extended family of ex-slaves, Philip J. Schwarz's conclusion examines how the law shaped the interaction between former slaves and masters after emancipation. Instead of relying on a static view of these two centuries, the author focuses on the diverse and changing ways that lawmakers and law enforcers responded to slaves' behavior and to whites' perceptions of and assumptions about that behavior.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas written by Robert L. Paquette and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World, written by a team of leading international contributors.
Download or read book The War Before the War written by Andrew Delbanco and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book Selection Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Lionel Trilling Book Award A New York Times Critics' Best Book "Excellent... stunning."—Ta-Nehisi Coates This book tells the story of America’s original sin—slavery—through politics, law, literature, and above all, through the eyes of enslavedblack people who risked their lives to flee from bondage, thereby forcing the nation to confront the truth about itself. The struggle over slavery divided not only the American nation but also the hearts and minds of individual citizens faced with the timeless problem of when to submit to unjust laws and when to resist. The War Before the War illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.
Download or read book Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World written by Edward B. Rugemer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Rugemer’s comparative history, spanning 200 years, reveals the political dynamic between slaves’ resistance and slaveholders’ power in two prosperous slave economies: Jamaica and South Carolina. This struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other.
Download or read book The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice written by William Goodell and published by . This book was released on 1853 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stroud s Slave Laws written by George McDowell Stroud and published by Black Classic Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stroud's Slave Laws had extensive influence upon national legal thinking on the issue of slavery. In a blanket survey of slave codes of the period, he analyzed the statutes of twelve slaveholding states. Stroud's book exposed to the world, through its publications in 1827 and 1856, the diabolical nature of legal enactments throughout the South that debased both African people and those who held them in bondage.
Download or read book The Law of American Slavery written by Kermit L. Hall and published by Articles-Garlan. This book was released on 1987 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a collection of articles on the operation of the law or slavery in the American South before the Civil War. The reliance of the law to define the condition of the slave under the American slavery system is analyzed in these articles.
Download or read book Homicide Justified written by Andrew Fede and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.
Download or read book Bonds of Empire written by Lee B. Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bonds of Empire reveals how English law facilitated the expansion of slavery in British America. Moving beyond an examination of criminal law, the book suggests that plantation slavery and the laws that governed it were not beyond the pale of English imperial legal history.
Download or read book A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America written by George McDowell Stroud and published by . This book was released on 1827 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Slavery in America written by Kenneth Morgan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed specially for undergraduate course use, this new textbook is both an introduction to the study of American slavery and a reader of core texts on the subject. No other volume that combines both primary and secondary readings covers such a span of time--from the early seventeenth century to the Civil War. The book begins with a substantial introduction to the entire volume that gives an overview of slavery in North America. Each of the twelve chapters that follow has an introduction that discusses the leading secondary books and articles on the topic in question, followed by an essay and three primary documents. Questions for further study and discussion are included in the chapter introduction, while further readings are suggested in the chapter bibliography. Topics covered include slave culture, the slave-based economy, slavery and the law, slave resistance, pro-slavery ideology, abolition, and emancipation. The essays, by such eminent historians as Drew Gilpin Faust, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, and Sylvia R. Frey, have been selected for their teaching value and ability to provoke discussion. Drawing on black and white, male and female experiences, the primary documents come from a wide variety of sources: diaries, letters, laws, debates, oral testimonies, travelers’ accounts, inventories, journals, autobiographies, petitions, and novels.
Download or read book Slavery the Law written by Paul Finkelman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, prominent historians of slavery and legal scholars analyze the intricate relationship between slavery, race, and the law from the earliest Black Codes in colonial America to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott decision prior to the Civil War. Slavery & the Law's wide-ranging essays focus on comparative slave law, auctioneering practices, rules of evidence, and property rights, as well as issues of criminality, punishment, and constitutional law.
