Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (original) (raw)
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JAH Review Essay - Works on Slavery.pdf
Review essay of "Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom" by Russ Castronovo; "Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress," by William Lee Miller; and "Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson," by Paul Finkelman. Appeared in Journal of American History, Vol. 83 (Dec. 1996), 981-983.
No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding
2018
Measuring the Monster Noted historian Sean Wilentz offers a weighty and sure-to-be controversial contribution to the extensive historiography on slavery and the original intent of the Constitution. Many historians agree the Constitution was, explicitly or implicitly, a proslavery document, ratified by elite white men many of whom had an interest in slavery as an American institution. But Wilentz
University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2019
The publication of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist was a mouthwatering development that significantly impacted the discourse analysis of America’s antebellum history. This book examines the macro-economics of slavery in United States history from a profoundly revisionist approach. It argues that the expansion of the institution of slavery created the wealth that financed the industrialization and modernization of the United States from 1783 to 1865. This challenges conventional interpretations that often portray slavery as a premodern economic institution largely isolated in time and detached from America’s socio-economic and political ideals and development that characterized the post-independence republic. This paper closely examines the methodological approaches and main arguments raised in chapters three, four and five of Baptist’s book. It argues that the full integration of the grim realities of the institution of slavery in these chapters is a sad tale of folly, a half that has now been told but that should be taken with a grain of salt.
Chicago Kent Law Review, 1992
At first glance slavery in the United States seems anomalous, a relic of an earlier age that somehow survived the Revolution, with its emphasis on natural rights and its assertion that all people "are created equal."I The title of the most influential and important history of American slavery, Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution, 2 suggests the way most Americans have traditionally looked at slavery. That a neo-abolitionist historian, publishing two years after Brown, 3 thought slavery was "peculiar" should not surprise us. But even antebellum Southerners often referred to slavery as their "peculiar institution." ' 4 On the eve of the Civil War, white Southerners, while they extolled the value of slavery, knew their system of organizing labor and controlling race relations was unacceptable to much of the world. It was truly peculiar. In contrast to Stampp, in 1981 Orlando Patterson, a sociologist, argued that the "peculiar institution" was a misnomer for slavery. He claimed that "[t]here is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized." 5 Patterson found slavery in every "region on earth" and concluded that "probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders." 6 I. THE PECULIARITY AND THE CENTRALITY OF AMERICAN SLAVERY In a number of ways Stampp and Patterson are both right. In the
When Is the Time of Slavery? The History of Slavery in Contemporary Legal and Political Argument
2008
The freed slaves then began another journey, this time not from captivity to slavery, but from slavery to citizenship and equality under the law." In re African American Slave Descendant Litigation 1 "[S]lavery itself did not end in 1865, as is commonly believed, but rather extended into the twentieth century." Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks 2 When is the time of slavery? Is slavery a part of our nation's experience, now safely buried in the deep past, or are its echoes too loud to ignore? Has our nation's trajectory been one of continuous progress from slavery to freedom, or did change happen fitfully and incompletely? And was slavery an institution defined by race, or was race only incidental to its origins and operation?