History @ CUL

Announcing “Slavery and the Law”

 

Proquest History Vault:

Slavery and the Law: Race, slavery, and free Blacks petitions to southern legislatures and southern county courts.

Announcing the arrival of this new digital collection.

The Slavery and the Law collection provides testimony on a broad range of subjects by a variety of southerners—Black and white, slave and free, slaveholder and non-slaveholder, man and woman.

The documents vividly portray the contrasts, ambivalences, contradictions, ironies, and ambiguities that comprise southern history. They reveal not only what southerners were saying, but what they were doing; not only what happened to slaves, but how the slaves responded. They show how complex political, economic, legal, and social conditions affected the lives of southerners, Black and white, male and female, slave and free. This unparalleled resource offers topical, geographical, and chronological breadth and penetrating depth of this subject matter. Responding to a specific event, situation, or danger, petitioners realized that it behooved them to be as forthright as possible. They often discussed their circumstances with remarkable candor. Included are rare biographical and genealogical details—how slaves, as chattel, could and often did find themselves sold, conveyed, or distributed as part of their master’s estates; and the impact of market forces on the slave family. The guardianship and emancipation petitions present an unusually clear picture of the association between whites and free Blacks; and the divorce petitions provide a unique picture of slaveholding white women.
Series I: Petitions to State Legislatures offers access to important but virtually unused primary source materials that were scattered in state archives of Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The collection includes virtually all extant legislative petitions on the subject of race and slavery.

The documents in Series II: Petitions to Southern County Courts were collected from local courthouses, and candidly document the realities of slavery at the most immediate grassroots level in southern society.
It was at county courthouses where the vast majority of disputes over the institution of slavery were referred. The petitions that were filed provide some of the most revealing documentation in existence on
the functioning of the slave system. Slavery and the Law also includes State Slavery Statutes, a master record of the laws governing American slavery, covering 1789–1865. Materials in the collection cover virtually every aspect of the regulation of Blacks of the period. With the slavery statutes available digitally, historians will have convenient access to revealing legislation on African American and southern history and culture.

In some cases,only  abstracts of the documents are full text searchable. The documents themselves are handwritten manuscripts available for download as pdfs.

Comments

Comments are closed.