Title: Slavery in the United States: Persons or Property?
Abstract:The American Constitution does not mention slavery until 1865, with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished the institution. Yet the Constitution, written in 1787, is riddled with pr...The American Constitution does not mention slavery until 1865, with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished the institution. Yet the Constitution, written in 1787, is riddled with provisions tied to slavery which protected it without naming it. The goal of this chapter is relatively modest: to examine how the US Constitution and the Supreme Court ‘understood’ what slavery was and how the Court defined it. I begin by exploring how seventeenthcentury Englishmen in colonial Virginia developed a legal system to accommodate and perpetuate slavery within a common law regime that was essentially hostile to human bondage. The colonial lawmakers had to develop rules to balance the tension between treating Africans and others as persons held to labor and as property owned by other people. This colonial background sets the stage for understanding how the framers at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 protected slavery in law. Next, I examine how the US Supreme Court came to define slavery through its jurisprudence. A constant theme of this discussion is how the legal system balanced the dual status of slaves as ‘people’ and as ‘property’.Read More
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 7
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