The institution of slavery in the United States shaped early politics for decades. Political, moral, and legal arguments were the subject of controversy for the country’s government. The culmination of these arguments was the Civil War, where the politics of slavery was discussed on the battlefield. It is necessary to examine the history of slavery in its historical context. The legalities of slave ownership were determined by the individual states. This practice let the states choose how to apply the law in their own fashion resulting in contradictory approaches to the common law. In most states, a slave was defined as chattel property. The contradiction comes in several court cases and other examples in the application of the law toward slaves, who became subject to a mixed condition of chattel and realty. They were not considered merely property but also as persons of some autonomy in the lens of criminal cases. This blended treatment was a necessity for the slaveholder states as it was used primarily to maintain white hegemony. This order was threatened by the existence of free states in the union, causing the leaders of the South to impose slavery on a federal level. When this did not appear viable anymore the South created the Confederacy, and with it a mirror constitution that had the protection and expansion of slavery as the principal foundation.
The legal solutions respecting slavery dealt primarily with differences between chattel and real definitions of property. Slaves were considered chattel property in most cases. However, as Thomas D. Morris expressed, “For one reason or another rules of real property law were applied to slaves in some instances in over one-third of the jurisdictions that made up the slave South.” The legal demarcation of a slave as property varied. But ultimately, this did not matter in regard to the status of slaves.[1] The differing solutions of defining a slave as either chattel or real did not change the condition of the captive person. They were always considered property and disenfranchised. Morris poignantly states, “Defining slaves as realty might or might not have had an effect on their lives or their treatment, but it had nothing to do with their status. What it did concern, for example, would be the rules that would apply to them if their owner died without a will.” The most important distinction in slavery was that between owner and property. Continued ownership and inheritance of slaves was most important to heirs and debt collectors.[2] Slaves were not only valued as property but as producers of goods and important factors in the plantation system.
The relationship of law and the owner-slave dynamic was not only important in keeping black people as property but in maintaining the owner’s status in the world around it. In Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”, Holly Brewer contended that in colonial Virginia “The wealthiest Virginians not only favored hereditary status and slavery but opposed laws to protect liberties such as habeas corpus passed by the burgesses. Slavery and racism were part of larger arguments about hereditary status and lineage.”[3] Land was seen as the symbol of status and potential wealth for the colonists and this view continued through the revolution and formation of the United States. The reality of land ownership is that wealth comes from what can be accomplished on it. Thomas Paine wrote, “And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.” [4] It is evident that land and its potential for development was a major source of agricultural income not only for Virginians as Brewer states but for all landowners in Colonial America and the subsequent United States. Slaves hold; in conjunction with land, the means necessary to create wealth. Morris’s description of state defined slavery involving the use of chattel and realty law corresponds with the legal difficulty in describing a person as owned property.[5] This difficulty resulted in a fluid use of law in many southern slave states with slaves being considered chattel, realty, and individual persons.
In 1740 South Carolina explicated in the slave code what constituted a slave. The code included any and all Blacks, Mulattos, Indians who had been sold as slaves. It declared that they and their children would be considered chattel personal and not freehold property. As personal property, slaves were beholden to, and attached to their owners. They were legally considered enslaved to the owner, no matter where they were. Before this slave code South Carolina attempted to govern slaves under the common law of England after its adoption. They found that it was difficult to govern slaves under that system, thus bringing about the slave codes. John Samuel Harpham pointed out that, “And even though the 1740 act did not explicitly detach the law of slavery from the general law of the colony, it did, as a comprehensive code that gathered together all aspects of law that dealt with slaves, realize just that ambition.” Slaves were subject to this separate law and therefore not afforded the protections of the common law. They sometimes became the subjects of beatings and other brutalities with no recourse in the court.[6] This separation from of slaves from regular law is encapsulated well by Harpham:
The aim of laws that classified slaves as chattels, removed them from the protections of the common law, and deprived them of rights was in part to enforce their subordination to every free white person. But most of all the aim of these measures was to deprive slaves of the forms of personhood that might exceed, undermine, or deviate from the wills of their masters.
The ties between owner and slave were both shaped by and formative in the formulation of southern slave laws. The laws enforced on the slave population were designed to maintain their status as an underclass and to mold them to submission.[7] The slave code was designed to remove the rights of black people. However, it is extremely hard to empirically classify a person as an object as chattel laws tried to do.
Harpham’s continued analysis of South Carolina pointed out that, “The slave was also considered, in other respects, not as property but as a person, not as a thing but as a human
being.” He then stated, “The law of slavery in South Carolina in other words does not represent
the determined effort to erase any sign of the humanity of the slave. It records instead the fully intentional development of two concepts of the slave – nonhuman in some cases and human in others.” Treating slaves as both property and persons allowed slave owners to maintain slavery in certain ways.[8] In legal proceedings, it gave the slave independent agency that is not afforded to that which is considered purely property. This allowed for the punishment of slaves participating in unrest. Property, such as animals or land, do not rebel. The lawmakers of the time understood that it is only people that have the capacity to rebel and, more commonly, break laws.
In the context of criminal cases the law afforded the slave owner some immunities to liability in criminal cases involving their slaves. In the Missouri case Ewing v. Thompson (1850) a slave killed another slave. One view of the case at the time was that the owner had the same responsibilities over the slave as they had over their dogs or other animals in cases where those animals caused harm to other people or property. Morris stated that, “The court did not accept the theory. Under the laws of Missouri, the power of a master was limited, and ‘his responsibility is proportioned accordingly.’ It did not include a responsibility for the wanton aggressions of his slave except where expressly covered by statute.” Slave owners did have some liability regarding their slaves, but in extreme cases such as murder the slave was considered a person with the reason and ability to not commit heinous crimes. This ruling however contradicted existing Missouri common law which placed liability of the property on the owner.[9] The complex legal status of slaves was not only apparent in southern law but in northern cases as well.
The complexities of slave law were exemplified in United States v. The Amistad (1841). The Spanish ship La Amistad was transporting captured Africans to Cuba. During the journey the Africans aboard the ship mutinied and demanded that the ship return to their native continent. The ship’s crew instead steered north in the hopes that an American vessel would find them and recapture the Africans. After the ship was found, investigations and court proceedings were launched in New Haven, Connecticut. The importation of Africans as slaves to the United States had already been abolished in 1808 and thus the Africans had to prove that they were in fact African in order to reclaim their freedom. Benjamin N. Lawrence clarified that, “At any given moment during the trials, the Amistad survivors were simultaneously, in the eyes of different jurists and the public at large, Cuban slave runaways and freeborn Africans, celebrated fugitives, and cold-blooded murderers.”[10] In the eyes of the court the Africans, when viewed as slaves, were subject to slavery laws and would be punishable for mutiny. However, if the Africans were indeed illegally captured, then the mutiny would be considered self-defense against kidnappers.[11] The fine line between property and person was difficult to determine. If the Africans onboard the Amistad had not been so lucky to be found near the anti-slavery Northeast, they might have not been so fervently helped. It is important to note the distinction this case makes regarding people and property. Slave code at this point in time, considered only slaves, and the children of slaves to be property.[12] The only people who were considered chattel property were those who had been slave since birth. This legal distinction is important regarding the difference between property and person while also not denying that a slave was also a person.
The legal proceedings surrounding slaves were muddied by the separation of the slave from personhood in some cases but not others. Harpham explained that the concept of dual status for slaves, as both property and persons was an important distinction:
Madison recognized, by contrast, that the ambivalent character of the slave was a principle internal to slavery; it was slavery’s basic aspect. And as Madison also understood, this point was most vividly expressed in the law. The authors of American slave law thus intended not simply to relegate slaves to the status of things, but to renderslaves members of a fluid category, who could be considered as property or as
persons without contradiction or dissonance.[13]
By expounding James Madison’s view, it is certain that slave law was not meant to completely categorize slaves as objects. By affording slaves minute autonomy in the law they could then hold them accountable for the only act that slave owners truly feared, the threat of rebellion. The slave owners never denied that slaves possessed some sort of independent thought. With this knowledge they were able to create an incongruous set of laws that treated people as property and persons. Owners were afforded complete control over their captives while also having limited liability in the actions of the slaves. On the opposite side slaves were under total obligation to their owners while having full consequences of any actions taken against this status. This legally incompatible combination of laws and definitions served its purpose, which was to maintain white power and status over black slaves.[14]
All of the slave states in the United States differed slightly in their legal decisions regarding slaves and the law. Yet the gist of all these different laws allowed slave owners to maintain absolute authority over their property. This legal structure dedicated to the preservation of slavery became the fundamental structure of the Confederacy and its new constitution. Aaron R. Hall explained:
In this strange constitutional moment, Hill made one principle clear to his constituency. ‘In short,’ he proclaimed, ‘the General Government, in all its jurisdiction, is required to protect Slavery.’ If a bloody clash with the United States ensued, the Confederacy stood
ready because ‘[w]e can keep our negroes at work to support us while we send our young men to war.’[15]
The Confederate constitution was drafted in a linear fashion along the principles of the “old” Constitution. The primary adjustments pertained to the continuance of slavery. In this new constitution were insurances for the right to owning slaves. This right was also further protected by inhibition of any economic expansion that would undermine slavery as the main driver of the economy. At the same time, the class of slave owners were urged to governance to maintain political and legislative power in the new country. Slavery was also spread through provisions that ensured potential new non-slave states would not truly be free from slavery. Other measures taken included phrases declaring the right to hold black slaves as property.[16] The slave economy was also protected against dethronement, and the crafters of the Confederate constitution opposed the labor provided by any free person. The framers of the confederate constitution also held anti-industrial sentiments with the intent of continued agricultural superiority and an acute devotion to slave labor.[17] The confederate constitution and government was loyal to agriculture and slavery. This loyalty was crafted by the development of the plantation system that had occurred over the previous centuries.
It was the plantation system and its demand for cheap labor that drove the need for slavery. This structure became a hierarchy and those at the top of the hierarchy did not wish to be supplanted. Ira Berlin wrote that:
The degradation of black life in mainland North America had many sources, but the largest was the growth of the plantation, a radically different form of social organization and commercial production controlled by a new class of men whose appetite for labor was nearly insatiable. Drawing power from the metropolitan state, planters-who preferred the designation ‘masters’-transformed the societies with slaves of mainland North America into slave societies. In the process, they re-defined the meaning of race, investing pigment-both white and black-with a far greater weight in defining status than heretofore.
The agricultural system of the slave states was saturated into their social order. Southern slavery’s continuance rested upon the hierarchy of wealth and race.[18] The cultivation of slavery was so important to the southern planters that they built their confederacy on its principles. The eventual Confederacy was, however, only a culmination of governance that had developed for decades in the slave states.
The slave states promoted private ownership of slaves and engaged in the public use of slaves to develop infrastructure. Aaron Hall pointed out that, “Slavery was an instrument with which states governed rather than simply a subject to govern. This distinction matters for understanding southern state development and the historical relationship between states, slaves, and citizen-beneficiaries.”[19] Southern slave states directly owned varying amounts of slaves. These captive laborers were bought and used for the construction and development of infrastructure, including roads and railways. The creation of infrastructure in turn allowed plantations efficiency in transportation of materials and goods. State owned slaves worked to promote the production of privately owned slaves. Hall wrote that, “The state appointed two chief superintendents who were ‘constantly to attend to and direct . . . overseers and hands.’ Georgia redeployed ninety-eight men and conducted a slave-buying spree. By 1830, Georgia held 207 slaves, with title to each person duly recorded with the secretary of state.” These slaves built roads all across Georgia under ownership of the state. According to Hall, “Within the year, the governor announced they had laid sixty miles to Augusta, forty-one to Savannah, thirteen to Milledgeville, thirty-one to Columbus, and fifty around Flint River.” This state ownership of slaves was a popular system as all the dangers of taming the land was relegated to slaves.[20] The dependence on slaves for state infrastructure was present in other slave states as well.
In Louisiana slaves had been used as a public workforce since its French inception. This continued under the subsequent Spanish reign through its return to France and its eventual purchase by the United States. In Louisiana slaves were contracted out by their masters and many became lumbermen, and others enjoyed a limited independence working as boatmen along the Mississippi river.[21] This usage of slaves continued through statehood into the nineteenth century. Hall noted, “Since 1834, a ‘state force’ reaching 129 men had cleared rafted rivers and clogged bayous with snag-removing steamboats, laboring under administrators who sought increased human and mechanical capacity.” The state of Louisiana enjoyed the wielding of slaves in public interests as it was the most economical option. The cost of employing slave labor was free after initial purchase of the person. In the face of decreasing budgets, slave labor was continued to be used to clear waterways and build railroads for the planter or owner class.[22] In South Carolina slaves were also used by the state. Ryan A. Quintana wrote that:
In South Carolina, enslaved men and women built the colony and then state’s earliest roads and bridges. They waded deep into murky swamps and marshes to carve out cuts and canals. They constructed fortifications during times of war, and cooked, cleaned, and carried supplies for the state’s army and navy. Slaves erected jails and courthouses as the population grew and migrated.[23]
Slaves were a means of private enterprise and public good for the slave states. Faced with the prospect of northern anti-slavery activism, it is clear that the attachment to slave labor drove the creation of the confederacy.
The Confederate constitution was not only created to protect slavery as a right for white citizens, but as a key structure. Hall wrote. “They produced a constitutional order that sanctioned national statism to maintain the centrality of slavery.” Slaves were not only a private right, but a state right. The confederate constitution likewise gave states the right to conscript forces to defend themselves and their rights. Conscription of soldiers was principally limited to white men, and military service being seen as a duty of citizenship. Hall specified, “But the nation had foundational limits. Slaves and ‘free negroes’ could not belong. They were anti-citizens. The Confederate nation depended on them as property and as subjects for wealth and identity.” [24] Usage of slaves in the creation of infrastructure and wealth rendered them a necessary part of southern governance. Allowing anything to upset this tenuous balance would cause irreparable damage to the foundations of slave society. The hierarchy of slavery was dependent on the belief that black people were inferior and unequal. However, it was impossible to not recognize slaves as persons because their value lied in autonomous labor, a uniquely human characteristic. The potential allowance of citizenship to some blacks empowered arguments against black enslavement. The planter class of the south recognized that the dual condition slaves held, as persons and properties, was held together only by the preservation of hierarchy.
This hierarchy was delicate and flimsy, held together by laws that considered slaves as chattel property in some contexts and as persons in other circumstances. Many of these laws were local and state decisions. Van Gosse wrote, “Indeed, given the number of jurisdictions involved, the United States comprised many patchworks, a ‘Patchwork Nation,’ and these arrangements, even when intended to bolster white social control, created openings for persons of African descent.”[25] When court decisions recognized a slaves autonomous actions in cases of criminal activity, it removed liability on the part of the owner. However, each decision that was taken to the immediate benefit of the owner in reducing liability, expanded slave autonomy in minute ways. Simultaneously, each independent black person was a small blow to the racial hierarchy that was meant to empower owners over their property. Berlin stated:
While plantation slaves renewed and refreshed their ties with Africa, urban creoles gained their freedom and integrated themselves into the evolving European-American world becoming fluent in the fashions and manners of the metropolis, familiar with its religion and literature, conversant in its culture, and at one with the material aspirations of other mainland colonists.[26]
Free, independent blacks were living proof of a black person’s autonomous capabilities. The “urban creoles” Berlin mentioned were also a source of legal consternation for southern lawmakers. Freedom was not easy to obtain for blacks, even with the help of a white person. Legal codes had to be followed, and any slave that was freed was subject to possible enslavement if the law was not followed. Morris stated, “To illustrate, South Carolina had a statutory provision that if a person was emancipated otherwise than according to the law of 1800, it would be lawful for any person to seize the slave as his or her property.” If freedom was given improperly the person could be recaptured with no recourse.[27] Maintenance of the social order of race was important. Freedom could not be easily given according to state laws, even if an owner wanted to free a slave.
Every free slave and every free state threatened the tenuous bind between owner and slave. Gosse wrote that, “For persons of African descent, however, the absence of a consistent nationwide regulation of the terms of freedom, slavery, and citizenship was a decidedly mixed blessing.” In recognition of the existence of free blacks in Northern states; southern states mad sure that any free blacks in their states were not allowed the same freedoms afforded in the north. Gosse explained, “As one scholar concluded, given that free people of color were ‘tried under the same laws as slaves and were hailed before the same court,’ they were ‘not citizens of this state.’ ”[28] Prevention of a black citizenry was of the utmost importance for southern slaveholders. If one black person could be a citizen then all slaves could be citizens and the order of slavery would then be uprooted. The problem for southern slaveholders was that their control only extended to their states. Being in a union of states allowed for places with their own laws regarding slavery and blacks. In Upper New England slavery disappeared early. Black people were allowed an insecure personhood that gave them the ability to participate in politics, land ownership, and social involvement. Other northern states were slower to adopt free blacks but they gradually allowed emancipation, resulting in black, voting populations in New York and Philadelphia. The middle states starting with the likes of Virginia and Delaware, stretching out west to Kentucky and Missouri, were somewhat of a middle ground for slave policy. Many blacks were free in these areas and could own property but could not vote.[29] The coexistence of free blacks and enslaved blacks was a problem for those slave states that depended on the plantation order. More and more blacks received further personhood in varying degrees depending on the state. The conflicting ideologies between the plantation south and industrial north divided the United States.
This divide was further deepened by the necessity of state law to define slavery. The United States federal government for a time did not make a concerted effort to pass legislation regarding slavery. They left that decision making to the states. Patricia Hagler Minter pointed out:
In charging the jury, and again before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Chief Justice William Cushing also came close to incorporating Somerset into American law, when he concluded that the ‘free and equal clause’ of the state constitution and the absence of positive laws governing slavery despite the presence of slaves, that ‘slavery is in my judgment as effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges wholly incompatible and repugnant to its existence . . . ’ Slavery, therefore, ended without statutory or constitutional action in the Bay State.
In Massachusetts the lack of positive slave laws, indicated that slavery did not exist there.[30] A lack of mention of slavery in the constitution left states making decisions on their own. The existence of free states in a federal union with slave states led to concerted efforts on the part of the slave states to maintain their institution. The lack of positive slave law in northern states possibly led to the creation of distinctly anti-slavery laws in some northern state. Minter stated that:
The Court held that any person who entered Ohio with the consent of the slave holder was free the moment they touched Ohio soil. From there, Ohio courts continued into the 1850s building on this anti-sojourning precedent and liberated every fugitive who crossed the Ohio River, even as federal courts ordered Ohio to follow the federal 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and returned escaped slaves to bondage.[31]
Free states defied the federal law with their own despite the South’s efforts. Faced with northern opposition to slavery the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1793, and later empowered further in 1850. It is with this law that the South expressed their desires for national slavery. Matthew Karp explained, “Across the 1850s southerners frequently claimed the power of the federal government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and, depending on the circumstances, safeguard the rights of slaveholders in the western territories.”[32] The strengthening of this act was completed through the court.
It was in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that the federal government intervened in a state disagreement with federal law. Minter specified that, “In holding that states could not interfere
with a slaveholder’s property rights and in fact had to protect them (although state officials were not obligated to assist enforcement of the federal law), Prigg opened the door for a Court with a pro-slavery majority to nationalize the institution.”[33] It was with that federal power that the South wished to wield slave authority. Hall explained:
Southern economic, political, and cultural nationalism was ascendant. State sovereignty rationalized secession but was doctrinally thin. Beyond slave rendition and pushing to constitutionalize slavery, antebellum southern leaders had relied on federal power to clear the way for slave-based agriculture and to guard against threats to its safety and profitability.
This desire for a constitutionalized slavery meant that the South wanted a federal protection in place. The free states and free blacks threatened the plantation order causing the South to desire the right for their states to continue slavery, and for central authority to maintain that right.[34] The delicate order and hierarchy of slavery depended on federal authority in free states. This reliance on the federal government to enforce slavery in other states was eventually threatened by the electoral victories of the Republican party in the north. Karp wrote that, “Slaveholding leaders had long viewed the demographic growth of the North with alarm: California’s admission to the Union, John C. Calhoun warned, gave the free states ‘a decided ascendancy’ in the House, the Senate, and the electoral college. By 1850 the nonslaveholding states accounted for nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population.”[35] The threat of northern and western opposition to centralized slavery was growing. The creation of new free states or territories in the West put pressure on southern policies. For slavery to continue it needed to expand, and each free state admitted to the union was a blow to the south. Karp explained further:
For many analysts of the sectional crisis, the South’s political offensives during the Buchanan years—the sweeping Dred Scott decision, the proslavery Lecompton Constitution in Kansas, and the demand for a federal slave code in the territories—all flowed from the hydraulic pressure exerted by this mix of power and vulnerability. Driven by the desperate need to protect slavery while they still controlled the government, southern leaders pushed their northern Democratic allies too far, splitting the party and setting the stage for Republican victory in 1860.
Despite the several political and legal victories the South enjoyed, the gradual industrialization of the North and its labor threatened the plantation system. The development of the North contributed to the difference of values regarding labor and slavery. Many in the North saw the use of slaves as archaic and morally wrong. Even if many northern whites did not savor the company of black people, they still argued that those people should receive the fruits of their labor. The fervent pro-slavery democrats alienated the rest of their party.[36] The proponents of slavery increasingly used federal power to promote the expansion of slavery. Those who were indifferent to the cause of slavery held the view that slavery should be left for the states to decide. In the face of a loss of southern power, the slaveholders created their Confederacy to preserve what they had.
Southern slavery depended on deep, racial hierarchy. State law was contradictory and simultaneously considered slaves as property and persons but in all cases was used to maintain white authority. However, the confliction between the slave as a person and property led to unintended openings for blacks. The prospects of freedom for slaves in the North threatened the system of slavery in the South and in doing so threatened the power that the plantation owners wielded on a state and national level. All of this led to the South agreeing that it was necessary to create a new nation and constitution, this one being specific in the nationalization of slavery and what it perceived to be a white man’s right to own a slave.
Notes
1. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law: 1619-1860 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 63.
2. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 63.
3. Holly Brewer, Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2017), 1075.
4. Paine, Thomas. Agrarian Justice (Start Publishing, 2012). 6.
5. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 65.
6. Harpham, John Samuel. Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of
Slavery, (Routledge, 2018), 103-104.
7. Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 104-105.
8. Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 107.
9. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 260.
10. Benjamin N. Lawrence, A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’: The Amistad, Expert Testimony, and the Origins of Atlantic Studies (Routledge, 2014). 300.
11. Lawrence, A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’, 302-303.
12. Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 105.
13. Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 102.
14. Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 116.
15. Hall, Aaron R. Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution: The Centralized State and Centrality of Slavery in the Confederate Constitutional Order, (Journal of Southern History, 2017). 255.
16. Hall, Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution. 266.
17. Hall, Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution, 267.
18. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), Section 2.
19. Aaron Hall, Slaves of the State: Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South, (Oxford University Press, 2019), 22.
20. Hall, Slaves of the State, 23-24.
21. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, Chapter 8.
22. Hall, Slaves of the State, 33-35
23. Ryan A. Quintana, Slavery and the Conceptual History of the Early U.S. State (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 2018), 81-82.
24. Hall, Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution, 275.
25. Van Gosse, Patchwork Nation: Racial Orders and Disorder in the United States,
1790–1860 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 46.
26. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, Chapter 12.
27. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 372.
28. Gosse, Patchwork Nation,52.
29. Gosse, Patchwork Nation, 60-62.
30. Patricia Hagler Minter, ‘The State of Slavery’: Somerset, The Slave, Grace, and the Rise of Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Taylor and Francis, 2015), 606-607.
31. Minter, ‘The State of Slavery’, 610.
32. Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016), 199.
33. Minter, ‘The State of Slavery’, 610.
34. Hall, Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution, 279.
35. Karp, This Vast Southern Empire, 222.
36. Karp, This Vast Southern Empire, 223.
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[1] Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law: 1619-1860 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 63.
[2] Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 63.
[3] Holly Brewer, Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2017), 1075
[4] Paine, Thomas. Agrarian Justice (Start Publishing, 2012). 6.
[5] Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 65
[6] Harpham, John Samuel. Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of
Slavery, (Routledge, 2018), 103-104.
[7] Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 104-105.
[8] Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 107.
[9] Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 260.
[10] Benjamin N. Lawrence, A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’: The Amistad, Expert Testimony, and the Origins of Atlantic Studies (Routledge, 2014). 300.
[11] Lawrence, A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’, 302-303.
[12] Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 105.
[13] Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 102.
[14] Harpham, Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of Slavery, 116.
[15] Hall, Aaron R. Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution: The Centralized State and Centrality of Slavery in the Confederate Constitutional Order, (Journal of Southern History, 2017). 255.
[16] Hall, Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution. 266.
[17] Hall, Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution, 267.
[18] Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), Section 2.
[19] Aaron Hall, Slaves of the State: Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South, (Oxford University Press, 2019), 22.
[20] Hall, Slaves of the State, 23-24.
[21] Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, Chapter 8.
[22] Hall, Slaves of the State, 33-35.
[23] Ryan A. Quintana, Slavery and the Conceptual History of the Early U.S. State (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 2018), 81-82.
[24] Hall, Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution, 275.
[25] Van Gosse, Patchwork Nation: Racial Orders and Disorder in the United States,
1790–1860 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 46.
[26] Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, Chapter 12.
[27] Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 372.
[28] Gosse, Patchwork Nation, 52.
[29] Gosse, Patchwork Nation, 60-62.
[30] Patricia Hagler Minter, ‘The State of Slavery’: Somerset, The Slave, Grace, and the Rise of Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Taylor and Francis, 2015), 606-607.
[31] Minter, ‘The State of Slavery’, 610.
[32] Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016), 199.
[33] Minter, ‘The State of Slavery’, 610.
[34] Hall, Reframing the Fathers’ Constitution, 279.
[35] Karp, This Vast Southern Empire, 222.
[36] Karp, This Vast Southern Empire, 223.
Pieces of Cal and Peace of Mind 