The Legislature at War: Bandits, Runaways and the Emergence of a Virginia Doctrine of Separation of Powers (original) (raw)
2019, Law and History Review
The politics of war severely divided the Virginia Southside during the American Revolution. Laborers, ship pilots and other landless men and women bitterly resented the efforts of the patriot gentry to stop trade with Great Britain and to establish a military force. Planters feared that the presence of the British Navy would encourage slaves to flee or attack their masters. What role did law play in the patriot response to these conditions? This essay uses the case of Josiah Philips, who led a banditti residing in the Great Dismal Swamp, to show how law intersected with class and race in patriot thinking. The gentry's view of the landless as dependent and lacking in self-control and its view of black slaves as posing a constant threat of violence supported the application of special legal regimes suited to these dangers. In particular, Philips was “attainted” by the General Assembly, a summary legislative legal proceeding traditionally employed against offenders who threatened g...
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Related papers
Configurações, 2020
The subject of indentured servants who were urged to abandon their masters by the Royal Governor, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, has been overlooked by scholars. Since 1775, his incendiary Proclamation begs a series of questions historians have yet to answer. Why, for instance, did the Governor include servants? What circumstances prompted him to make such an invitation to bound persons? How did the elites in the colony respond? These, and other questions, are the focus of this essay that explores indentured servitude in Virginia during the age of the American Revolution. Besides enslaved African Americans, indentured servants influenced Dunmore's Proclamation that, in turn, encouraged the gentry in Virginia to break with England.
SSRN Electronic Journal
This essay canvasses how far meanings of "regime change" can be stretched beyond their current invocation as anodyne neologistic cover for the illegality of a "coup d'état." Some years ago the anthropologist John Borneman made one attempt to extend the compass of regime change beyond simple realist "topplings" of governments one disfavors to responsibility for legal reconstruction of the target regime because he wished to argue that idealistic interventions against tyrannical rule should always be legitimate. This essay asks whether the term can be stretched in a different direction, to encompass instances of intervention against tyrannical rule beyond the sphere of interstate relations where it is currently lodged. To test the proposition I turn here to a particular event-the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in 1831-and to recent work in political theory that dwells on the politics of counter-sovereignty. Here regime change encompasses a rebellion of slaves against a tyrannical slaveholding regime, a failed attempt to deploy a revolutionary politics of counter-sovereignty against the regime's pretensions to legality. Here tyranny remains the target of regime change. But rather than the solvent of tyrannical rule, law in this case is the instrument of its expression.
Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts
2014
Tyrannicide uses a captivating narrative to unpack the experiences of slavery and slave law in South Carolina and Massachusetts during the Revolutionary Era. In 1779, during the midst of the American Revolution, thirtyfour South Carolina slaves escaped aboard a British privateer and survived several naval battles until the Massachusetts brig Tyrannicide led them to Massachusetts. Over the next four years, the slaves became the center of a legal dispute between the two states. The case affected slave law and highlighted the profound differences between how the "terrible institution" was practiced in the North and the South, in ways that would foreground issues eventually leading to the Civil War. Emily Blanck uses the Tyrannicide affair and the slaves involved as a lens through which to view contrasting slaveholding cultures and ideas of African American democracy. Blanck's examination of the debate analyses crucial questions: How could the colonies unify when they view...
The Josiah Philips Attainder and the Institutional Structure of the American Revolution
2015
This is a study of the Case of Josiah Philips, a militant loyalist who led a terror campaign at the opening of the Revolutionary War and was attainted by an act of the Virginia General Assembly in 1778. In his edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, St. George Tucker asserted that judges on Virginia’s General Court had refused to enforce the attainder. It has long been thought that Tucker’s claim was false, since Philips was captured before the end of the grace period in the act of attainder. Here I return to the Philips sources from a new perspective, reinvigorate Tucker’s claims, and show how the case continues to be of interest. As I read it, the case is centrally concerned with a constitutional dispute over the role of the general assembly during wartime. In particular, Philips's treatment by the Virginia General Assembly exposed a disagreement about the proper scope of residual judicial powers in a republican assembly. Thomas Jefferson saw the assembly as the proper instituti...
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.