Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (Studies in Legal History)

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Description

This volume is the primary 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 once no coherent body of law that dealt solely with slaves. As a substitute, more general legal rules concerning inheritance, mortgages, and transfers of property coexisted with laws pertaining only to slaves. In keeping with Morris, southern lawmakers and judges struggled to reconcile a social order in response to slavery with existing English common law (or, in Louisiana, with continental civil law.) Because much was once left to local interpretation, laws varied between or even within states. As well as, legal doctrine incessantly differed from local practice. And, as Morris reveals, within the decades leading as much as the Civil War, tensions mounted between the legal culture of racial slavery and the competing demands of capitalism and evangelical Christianity.

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