Description
The five essays in Slave Laws in Virginia explore two centuries of the ever-changing relationship between an immense slave society and the laws that guided it. The themes 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 enjoy with its own fugitive slave laws. Throughout the history of one large extended circle of relatives 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 those two centuries, the creator makes a speciality of the varied and changing ways in which lawmakers and law enforcers responded to slaves’ behavior and to whites’ perceptions of and assumptions about that behavior.