You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Analyzes the history of enslaved African Americans' relationship with the criminal courts of the Old Dominion during a 160 year period.
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.
George Washington inherited his first slave at the age of eleven, and he was the only founding father to free his slaves in his will. This highly readable selection of articles focuses on Washington's changing attitudes toward the institution of slavery and his everyday relationships with the slaves who shared his Mount Vernon estate. Along with his insightful introduction, editor Philip J. Schwarz has included James C. Rees's essay "Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Changing Interpretation of Slave Life on the Mount Vernon Estate," Dennis J. Pogue's essay "Slave Lifeways at Mount Vernon: An Archaeological Perspective," and Lorena S. Walsh's essay "Slavery and Agriculture at Mount Vernon," as well as essays by Jean B. Lee, Mary V. Thompson, and Edna Greene Medford.
A significant number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginians migrated north and west with the intent of extricating themselves from a slave society. All sought some kind of freedom: whites who left the Old Dominion to escape from slavery refused to live any longer as slave owners or as participants in a society grounded in bondage; fugitive slaves attempted to liberate themselves; free African Americans searched for greater opportunity. In Migrants against Slavery Philip J. Schwarz suggests that antislavery migrant Virginians, both the famous--such as fugitive Anthony Burns and abolitionist Edward Coles--and the lesser known, deserve closer scrutiny. Their migration and its aftermath, he argues, intensified the national controversy over human bondage, playing a larger role than previous historians have realized in shaping American identity and in Americans' effort to define the meaning of freedom.
Central to the development of the American legal system, writes Professor Finkelman in Slavery & the Law, is the institution of slavery. It informs us not only about early concepts of race and property, but about the nature of American democracy itself. 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. What emerges from this multi-faceted portrait is a complex legal system designed to ensure the property rights of slave-holders and to institutionalize racism. The ultimate result was to strengthen the institution of slavery in the midst of a growing trend toward democracy in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic community.
The essays in this collection offer new evidence and new conclusions on topics in the history of African Americans in Virginia such as the demography of early slave imports, the means used to regulate slave labor, the situation of female hired slaves in the backcountry, African American women in the Civil War era, and the Garveyite grassroots organizations of the 1920s.
This new book by Andrew Fede considers the law of freedom suits and manumission from the point-of-view of legal procedure, evidence rules, damage awards, and trial practicein addition to the abstract principles stated in the appellate decisions. The author shows that procedural and evidentiary roadblocks made it increasingly impossible for many slaves, or free blacks who were wrongfully held as slaves, to litigate their freedom. Even some of the most celebrated cases in which the courts freed slaves must be read as tempered by the legal realities the actors faced or the courts actually recognized in the process. Slave owners in almost all slave societies had the right to manumit or free all ...
This book examines the daily details of slave work routines and plantation agriculture in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, focusing on case studies of large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia. Work was the most important factor in the slaves' experience of the institution. Slaves' day-to-day work routines were shaped by plantation management strategies that drew on broader pan-Atlantic intellectual and cultural principles. Although scholars often associate the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the rise of notions of liberty and human rights and the dismantling of slavery, this book explores the dark side of the Enlightenment for plantation slaves. Many planters increased their slaves' workloads and employed supervisory technologies to increase labor discipline in ways that were consistent with the process of industrialization in Europe. British planters offered alternative visions of progress by embracing restrictions on freedom and seeing increasing labor discipline as central to the project of moral and economic improvement.
In this provocative reinterpretation of one of the best-known events in American history, Woody Holton shows that when Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and other elite Virginians joined their peers from other colonies in declaring independence from Britain, they acted partly in response to grassroots rebellions against their own rule. The Virginia gentry's efforts to shape London's imperial policy were thwarted by British merchants and by a coalition of Indian nations. In 1774, elite Virginians suspended trade with Britain in order to pressure Parliament and, at the same time, to save restive Virginia debtors from a terrible recession. The boycott and the growing imperial conflict led to...