Homicide Justified

Homicide Justified PDF Author: Andrew Fede
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351121
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

Homicide Justified

Homicide Justified PDF Author: Andrew Fede
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351121
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

From Homicide to Slavery

From Homicide to Slavery PDF Author: David Brion Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195054180
Category : National characteristics, American
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This collection of Davis' work includes essays on capital punishment, movements of counter-subversion, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

From Homicide to Slavery

From Homicide to Slavery PDF Author: David Brion Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description


Lay this Body Down

Lay this Body Down PDF Author: Gregory A. Freeman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"As this true story unfolds, each detail seems more shocking: a young man forced to methodically kill his friends; his calm, unresisting compliance; men chained together, two by two, weighted down with rocks, and slowly driven to the bridges where they would be thrown over, alive and terrified; men ordered to dig their own graves."--BOOK JACKET.

Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865

Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865 PDF Author: Harriet C. Frazier
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786409778
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Slavery and its lasting effects have long been an issue in America, with the scars inflicted running deep. This study examines crimes such as stealing, burglary, arson, rape and murder committed against and by slaves, with most of the author's information coming from handwritten court records and newspapers. These documents show the death penalty rarely applied when a slave killed another slave, but that it always applied when a slave killed a white person. Despite Missouri's grim criminal justice system, the state's best lawyers were called upon to represent slaves in court on serious criminal charges, and federal law applied to all persons, granting slaves in Missouri protection that few other slave states had. By 1860, Missouri's population was only 10 percent slave, the smallest percentage of any slave state in America.

The Zong

The Zong PDF Author: James Walvin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300180756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
“A lucid, fluent and fascinating account of the Zong. The book details the horror of the mass killing of enslaved Africans on board the ship in 1781.”—Gad Heuman, co-editor of The Routledge History of Slavery On November 29, 1781, Captain Collingwood of the British ship Zong commanded his crew to throw overboard one-third of his cargo: a shipment of Africans bound for slavery in America. The captain believed his ship was off course, and he feared there was not enough drinking water to last until landfall. This book is the first to examine in detail the deplorable killings on the Zong, the lawsuit that ensued, how the murder of 132 slaves affected debates about slavery, and the way we remember the infamous Zong today. Historian James Walvin explores all aspects of the Zong’s voyage and the subsequent trial—a case brought to court not for the murder of the slaves but as a suit against the insurers who denied the owners’ claim that their “cargo” had been necessarily jettisoned. The scandalous case prompted wide debate and fueled Britain’s awakening abolition movement. Without the episode of the Zong, Walvin contends, the process of ending the slave trade would have taken an entirely different moral and political trajectory. He concludes with a fascinating discussion of how the case of the Zong, though unique in the history of slave ships, has come to be understood as typical of life on all such ships. “Engaging . . . [Walvin’s] expertise shines through with surgical use of statistics and absorbing deviations into subjects such as Turner’s masterpiece The Slave Ship and the slave-fueled growth of Liverpool.”—Daily Mail

Modern Medea

Modern Medea PDF Author: Steven Weisenburger
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809069547
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The widely acclaimed inquiry into the story that inspired Toni Morrison's "Beloved"--a nuanced portrait of the not-so-genteel Southern culture that perpetuated slavery and had such destructive effects on all who lived with it and in it. 25 illustrations.

Death of an Overseer

Death of an Overseer PDF Author: Michael Wayne
Publisher: Oxford : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195140036
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In May of 1857, the body of Duncan Skinner was found in a strip of woods along the edge of the plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, where he worked as an overseer. Although a coroner's jury initially ruled his death to be accidental, an investigation organized by planters from the community concluded that he had been murdered by three slaves acting under instructions from John McCallin, an Irish carpenter. Now, almost a century and a half later, Michael Wayne has reopened the case to ask whether the men involved in the investigation arrived at the right verdict. Part essay on the art of historical detection, part seminar on the history of slavery and the Old South, Death of an Overseer is, above all, a murder mystery--a murder mystery that allows readers to sift through the surviving evidence themselves and come to their own conclusions about who killed Duncan Skinner and why.

The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860

The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860 PDF Author: Mark Tushnet
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691198152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
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.

The Hanging of Arthur Hodge

The Hanging of Arthur Hodge PDF Author: John Andrew
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 9781469120560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The Hanging of Arthur Hodge-A Caribbean Anti-Slavery Milestone - selected for the Best Non-Fiction Book Award by The Sacramento Publishers Association - is a study of slavery in the British West Indies during the half-century before Parliaments 1834 decision to emancipate the slaves. Its focus is on the crimes, trial and execution of Arthur Hodge, a prominent Virgin Islands planter and politician whose unprecedented hanging for the murder of Prosper, one of his own slaves, was to rouse the British anti-slavery movement from the contentment it was enjoying following the abolition of the slave trade and help direct its efforts toward the ultimate emancipation of the slaves throughout the British Empire. The life, trial and execution of Arthur Hodge is a story of great interest in its own right, but that story is also important because it was truly a milestone on the road to the end of slavery in the British Empire. Arthur Hodge was a dominant figure in the Virgin Islands in the early 1800s. Born in the islands, he studied at Oxford and later served in the British army. His wife was a sister-in-law of the Marquess of Exeter. He was described as a man of great accomplishments and elegant manners. But evidence presented during his trial revealed another side of his character. Between 1803 and 1808 Hodge had murdered as many as sixty - or one-half - of the slaves who labored on his Tortola plantation. They died by whipping, scalding and having boiling water poured down their throats. Although Hodges treatment of his slaves was common knowledge, he was only brought to trial several years after the killings as a consequence of a political and personal dispute. Hodge was found guilty of murder by a local jury and - when the Governor of the Leeward Islands chose to ignore the jurys recommendation of leniency -became the only slave owner in the history of the British West Indies to be executed for the murder of one of his own slaves. Hodges character contrasted sharply with that of his chief prosecutor, Governor Hugh Elliot, a noted diplomat and a supporter of the anti-slavery forces in Great Britain whose brother, the Earl of Minto, was currently Viceroy of India and whose brother-in-law, Lord Auckland, had - four years before - carried the bill ending the slave trade in the House of Lords. The hanging of Arthur Hodge caused a sensation and transcripts of his trial were published in both Great Britain and the United States. The news helped to revitalize the anti-slavery forces, playing an important role in the debates leading to the establishment of slave registries and the accountability they implied throughout the Caribbean colonies. After a brief introduction which concludes with the language of the indictment issued against Hodge and his counsels response that "A Negro being property, it was no greater offense for his master to kill him than it would be to kill his dog," the book opens with a short history of the settlement of the Virgin Islands and descriptions - from contemporary sources - of the lives of plantation owners and of their slaves. Included are personal descriptions of enslavement in Africa, the Middle Passage, the work and recreation of the slaves, their religious beliefs and the brutalities which some of them endured. The following chapters contain biographies of Hodge and Elliot and a recapitulation of the events which led to Hodges indictment and trial. Original transcripts and reports were used as the basis for the report of the trial and execution. The book concludes with a discussion of the effects of the Hodge affair on the anti-slavery movement and capsule descriptions of the subsequent careers some of those involved. (Governor Elliot later served in India as Governor of Madras and is buried in Westminster Abbey). The work is based upon original and other contemporary sources, including both the published and official manuscript transcripts of Hodges trial and Governor Elliot