AMSTUD 255: The Law of American Slavery (HISTORY 255, HISTORY 355)

Course Description

The institution of slavery was made by law. It legitimated and facilitated enslavement, regulated the lives of the enslaved and their relationships with others, and determined how, if at all, enslaved people might become free. But the law was also made by slavery. Indeed, many features of our contemporary legal system - its structure, its rules, its concepts - grew out of the efforts of judges, legislators, and ordinary people to either defend or destroy the institution. This advanced undergraduate/graduate colloquium explores the interconnection of slavery and the law in a specifically American context, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the colonial era through the demise of slavery in the middle of the nineteenth century. In addition to working with secondary sources by historians and legal scholars, we will also spend considerable time with a wide variety of primary sources - legal texts that include treatises, statutes, local case files, and appellate decisions.