Session Abstract
Scholars of slavery in the Atlantic World have traditionally looked to the law for understandings of freedom and slavery. Even though the law reflects the beliefs and values of a slave society, it also creates a barrier to understanding how the process of enslavement impacted individual lives in specific places. The members of this panel seek to reexamine, through the stories of individual slaves and enslavers, how the law shaped understandings of the fundamental meaning of freedom. The panelists reveal, through an examination of lives intricately woven into neighborhoods and communities, that whites and blacks frequently stretched, remade, or flouted the law for their own political, social, or economic purposes. Individual negotiations of slavery and freedom under the auspices of the law tell a story of freedom far more focused on contingency, individual agency, place, and the peculiarities of legal codes, rather than the operation of the law as lawmakers designed.
By viewing the law through its application by individuals, and less through its creation by lawmakers, the papers in this panel reflect a new direction in American legal history; of viewing state law through the eyes of locals. By examining the ways individuals navigated through legal systems in Missouri, Virginia, and New Jersey, and made connections to the Atlantic World beyond, the members of this panel emphasize the complicated dynamics of local communities and the force of (frequently interracial) interpersonal relationships in shaping the meaning, significance, and application of law in various locales.
Kelly Kennington complicates our understandings of the construction of slavery and freedom in antebellum America through an analysis of freedom suits and the surprising roles that free and enslaved African Americans played in their execution. Kennington employs local court records from St. Louis and appellate records from a variety of southern states to reveal that African Americans shaped nineteenth-century legal understandings of freedom and bondage to a far greater degree than previously thought. Ted Maris-Wolf investigates changes in the meanings of liberty to free blacks in Virginia after the passage of the 1806 expulsion law and uses instances of the law’s enforcement and Afro-Virginians’ use of the state’s self-enslavement law to plumb various meanings of freedom through the Civil War. Maris-Wolf uses county court records to explain how Afro-Virginians quietly employed family, community, and commercial connections to overcome prosecution and, in some cases, renounce their legal freedom to avoid forced removal from the state. James Gigantino offers a reevaluation of the meanings of freedom, slavery, and abolition in the north by exploring local and national events through the eyes of New Jersey politicians, abolitionists, free blacks, and slaves. Gigantino examines the state’s 1846 abolition law to reveal differences between the views of New Jerseyans and New Englanders regarding slavery and freedom.
The members of this panel hope to contribute to a more general re-examination of slavery and the law rooted in individuals’ experiences and particular locales.