Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom

Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom

Gross, Ariela J.

Paperback

Series: Studies in the Legal History of the South

19th Century United States HistoryGeneral LawGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

ISBN10: 082032860X
ISBN13: 9780820328607
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: Oct 15 2006
Pages: 276
Weight: 0.86
Height: 0.66 Width: 6.08 Depth: 9.04
Language: English

This groundbreaking study of the law and culture of slavery in the antebellum Deep South takes readers into local courtrooms where people settled their civil disputes over property. Buyers sued sellers for breach of warranty when they considered slaves to be physically or morally defective; owners sued supervisors who whipped or neglected slaves under their care.

How, asks Ariela J. Gross, did communities reconcile the dilemmas such trials raised concerning the character of slaves and masters? Although slaves could not testify in court, their character was unavoidably at issue--and so their moral agency intruded into the courtroom. In addition, says Gross, wherever the argument that black character depended on management by a white man appeared, that white man's good character depended on the demonstration that bad black character had other sources.

This led, for example, to physicians testifying that pathologies, not any shortcomings of their master, drove slaves to became runaways. Gross teases out other threads of complexity woven into these trials: the ways that legal disputes were also affairs of honor between white men; how witnesses and litigants based their views of slaves' character on narratives available in the culture at large; and how law reflected and shaped racial ideology. Combining methods of cultural anthropology, quantitative social history, and critical race theory, Double Character brings to life the law as a dramatic ritual in people's daily lives, and advances critical historical debates about law, honor, and commerce in the American South.

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