There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.
The African Slave Trade and American Courts: The Pamphlet Literature. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988. 2 Vols. 832 pp. With a New Introduction by Paul Finkelman. Reprinted 2007, 2013 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 9781584777434; ISBN-10: 1584777435. Hardcover. New. 13 Pamphlets reprinted in fascimile, in 2 volumes, with a New Introduction by Paul Finkelman: 1. Story, Joseph. A Charge Delivered to the Grand Juries of the Circuit Court, at October Term, 1819, in Boston, and at November Term, 1819, in Providence, and Published at their Unanimous Request. 8 pp. 2. Story, Joseph. A charge Delivered to the Grand Jury of the Circuit Court of the United States, at its First Session in Portland, for the Judicial District of Maine, May 8, 1820, and Published at the Unanimous Request of the Grand Jury and of the Bar. Portland, 1820. 21 pp. 3. A Report of the Case of the Jeune Eugenie, Determined in the Circuit Court of the United States, for the First Circuit, at Boston, December, 1821. Boston, 1822. 108 pp. 4. The African Captives. Trial of the Prisoners of the Amistad on the Writ of Habeaus Corpus, before the Circuit Court of the United States, for the District of Connecticut, at Hartford; Judges Thompson and Judson. September Term, 1839. New York, 1839. [48] pp. 5. A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board. New Haven, 1840. 32 pp. 6. A Brief Review of Some of the Points in the Case of L'Amistad, and the Principles Involved. 15 pp. 7. Adams, John Quincy. Argument of John Quincy Adams, before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Case of the United States, Appelants, vs. Cinque, and Others, Africans, Captured in the Schooner Amistad, by Lieut. Gedney, Delivered on the 24th of February and 1st of March, 1841. New York, 1841. 135 pp. 8. Baldwin, Roger S. Argument of Roger S. Baldwin, of New Haven, before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Case of the United States, Appelants, vs. Cinque, and Others, Africans of the Amistad. New York, 1841. 32 pp. Please contact us for a complete list of titles contained in these two volumes. Reprinted from the Garland series Slavery, Race, and the American Legal System, 1700-1872, this group of 13 facsimiles relates to cases arising from the illegal importation of slaves. Highlights include the argument of John Quincy Adams in the Amistad case (1841) and two charges to juries by Joseph Story from 1819 and 1820. "[The volumes in this series] belong in every library used for research, and in particular at all law school libraries. They will prove valuable to historians, lawyers, law teachers and students, and all persons interested in the problems of slavery and race in American experience." William M. Wiecek, American Journal of Legal History 33 (1989) 187.
Winner, Joseph A. Andrews Award from the American Association of Law Libraries, 1986. Provides a detailed discussion and analysis of the pamphlet materials on the law of slavery published in the United States and Great Britain.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
A gripping true account of African slaves and white slavers whose fates are seemingly reversed, shedding fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia, and on the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade.
The three most important Supreme Court Justices before the Civil War—Chief Justices John Marshall and Roger B. Taney and Associate Justice Joseph Story—upheld the institution of slavery in ruling after ruling. These opinions cast a shadow over the Court and the legacies of these men, but historians have rarely delved deeply into the personal and political ideas and motivations they held. In Supreme Injustice, the distinguished legal historian Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice’s proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the incentives created by circumstances in his private life. Finkelman uses census data and other sources to reveal that Justice Marshall aggressively bought and sold slaves throughout his lifetime—a fact that biographers have ignored. Justice Story never owned slaves and condemned slavery while riding circuit, and yet on the high court he remained silent on slave trade cases and ruled against blacks who sued for freedom. Although Justice Taney freed many of his own slaves, he zealously and consistently opposed black freedom, arguing in Dred Scott that free blacks had no Constitutional rights and that slave owners could move slaves into the Western territories. Finkelman situates this infamous holding within a solid record of support for slavery and hostility to free blacks. Supreme Injustice boldly documents the entanglements that alienated three major justices from America’s founding ideals and embedded racism ever deeper in American civic life.
The Washington University Libraries presents an online exhibit of documents regarding the Dred Scott case. American slave Dred Scott (1795?-1858) and his wife Harriet filed suit for their freedom in the Saint Louis Circuit Court in 1846. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1857 that the Scotts must remain slaves.
In this book, prominent historians of slavery and legal scholars analyze the intricate relationship between slavery, race, and the law from the earliest Black Codes in colonial America to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott decision prior to the Civil War. Slavery & the Law's wide-ranging essays focus on comparative slave law, auctioneering practices, rules of evidence, and property rights, as well as issues of criminality, punishment, and constitutional law.
Interrogates the development of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice and the subsequent "liberation" of nearly two hundred thousand Africans in the nineteenth century.
In an examination of Southern slave law between 1810 and 1860, Mark Tushnet reveals a structured dichotomy between slave labor systems and bourgeois systems of production. Whereas the former rest on the total dominion of the master over the slave and necessitate a concern for the slave's humanity, the latter rest of the purchase by the capitalist of a worker's labor power only and are concerned primarily with economic interest. Focusing on a wide range of issues that include contract and accident law as well as criminal law and the law of manumission, he shows how Southern slave law had to respond to the competing pressures of humanity and interest. Beginning with a critical evaluation of slave law, the author develops the conceptual framework for his own perspective on the legal system, drawing on the works of Marx and Weber. He then examines four appellate court cases decided in three different states, from civil-law Louisiana to commonlaw North Carolina, at widely separated times, from 1818 to 1858. Professor Tushnet finds that the cases display a continuing but never wholly successful attempt at distinguish between law and sentiment as modes of regulating social interactions involving slaves. Also, the cases show that the primary method of accommodating law and sentiment was an attempt to use rigid categories to confine the law of slavery to what was thought its proper sphere. Mark Tushnet is Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
