Law, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in the Antebellum South

Edwards, Laura F.

doi:10.2307/2587586

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…And criminalized acts included any and all forms of refusal to submit to the authority of a master or any white person, any act of resistance against their violence, no matter how arbitrary or extreme, as well as any effort to escape. 30 Indeed, under the US Fugitive Slave Act 1850, the runaway slave was liable, as a person, for the crime of stealing herself, as a thing. 31 At the heart of slavery as a system of domination was a body of law that gave the enslaved their 'double character' as both things and persons.…”

Section: Persons and Thingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Things’ are not What they Seem: On Persons, Things, Slaves, and the New Abolitionist Movement

Davidson¹

2016

Current Legal Problems

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Children. The definition of 'trafficking' in the latter protocol is extremely loose. 'Trafficking' is defined not as a single, one-off event, but a coercive process that takes place over time (recruitment, transportation and control) and that is organised-in a variety of different ways-for purposes of exploitation. 'Exploitation' is undefined, and the nature and degree of force that will constitute 'coercion' unspecified. Despite, or perhaps because of, the vagueness of the term, political and media interest in 'trafficking' helped to support a resurgence of the anti-slavery movement in Western liberal countries, for although slavery is noted as just one possible outcome of 'trafficking' in the Trafficking Protocol, antislavery activists claimed 'trafficking' as a form of 'modern-day slavery'. Talk of 'trafficking' as an immense and growing global social problem has thus been translated into talk of slavery as a significant global problem, and a series of new non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have sprung up since the millennium with a mission to combat it. This includes Free the Slaves, founded in 2000, Stop the Traffik, founded in 2006, Not For Sale, founded in 2007, CNN Freedom Project, founded in 2011, and the Walk Free Foundation, founded in 2012, and many more. These 'new abolitionist' organisations draw upon the iconography of the original European and American abolitionist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in their campaign materials, and also borrow some of their campaigning tactics. They urge members of the public to participate in a movement to combat 'human trafficking' and 'modern slavery' by boycotting 'slave made' goods, for instance, and call on them to raise money to support anti-slavery organisations and projects, as well as to sign petitions and otherwise press their governments to act against the problem of 'modern slavery' both domestically and globally. There is one very notable contrast between the old and new abolitionism, however. Historically, antislavery activists had to pit themselves against strong opposition from established political and economic powers, and in some cases, even broke the law in order to protect fugitive slaves from being returned to their masters, or to operate an 'underground railway' by means of which people could escape slavery. Today, the relationship between new abolitionist organisations and political and business elites in Europe, North America and also Australia is extremely cordial.

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Section: Persons and Thingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Things’ are not What they Seem: On Persons, Things, Slaves, and the New Abolitionist Movement

Davidson¹

2016

Current Legal Problems

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“…Yet, it bears emphasis that such pioneering practitioners of this approach as Gross and Wilf are not starry-eyed in their treatment of ordinary people and their creative legalisms. The slaves who departed from cultural scripts in the trials Gross reconstructs are instead intended to illustrate that hegemony takes work —that lawyers and judges had to labor mightily as they attempted to rationalize away “evidence that slaves behaved as morally reasoning, self-governing agents” (Gross 2000, 73; see also Edwards 1999, 740). Moreover, in excavating popular law talk and the elaborate rituals through which nonofficials recast what had been formally pronounced in “the bounded sphere of courts and codes,” Wilf never loses sight of the space between law as it was envisioned and performed, on the one hand, and the law as it was enacted and imposed, on the other (Wilf 2010, 8).…”

Section: The Constitutive Claim and The Cultural Turnmentioning

confidence: 99%

Of Mandarins, Legal Consciousness, and the Cultural Turn in US Legal History: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125

Blumenthal¹

2012

Law soc. inq.

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This article traces the impact of Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” on scholars writing at the intersection of law and history. While Gordon's central claim about the constitutive character of the law has come to serve as a working assumption in the field, the case he made for the intellectual history of doctrine as articulated by legal mandarins has proven less influential in the twenty‐five years since the article was published. Instead, legal historians have focused their attention on the interaction between official and lay forms of law‐making with a decided emphasis on popular legal consciousness. For precisely this reason, the time may be ripe for reconsideration of mandarin materials, not only for what they have to tell us about the dynamics of cultural change, but also as sources of insight into basic puzzles of the human condition that have tended across time to be expressed in and through legal forms.

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“…and others have shown, male heads of households more generally claimed the status of masters based on their control of household dependents. Masculinity, independence, citizenship, racial superiority: all were bound up with the ability to exercise household authority over dependents and at least enough land to feel self-sufficient~Bardaglio 1995; Bederman 1995;Edwards 2000;Fox-Genovese 1988;McCurry 1995;Oakes 1990!. Though planters hardly noticed any intervening social category between themselves and their slaves, the conventions of control associated with the Cavalier gentleman shaped the meaning of independence for White farmers more generally.…”

Section: A Crisis Of Masterymentioning

confidence: 99%

“Walk With Me in White”

Steedman

2011

Du Bois Rev.

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This article argues that Americans operate with a concept and practice of political autonomy centered on a notion of "mastery," which is inextricably linked to race, gender, and class hierarchy. I adopt Max Weber's concept of mastery and use it to broaden the construct of a Herrenvolk democracy beyond its traditional association with White supremacy. I then use this theoretical framework to illuminate the emergence of segregation in Atlanta between 1880 and 1910. This period marks a crucial transformation in the concept of race in the United States, as the paternalism of Southern agricultural relations is transposed by Southern Progressives into more urban and industrial settings. I conclude by raising the possibility that the concept of political autonomy currently operative in the United States shares important common ground with the ideological achievements of the Southern Progressives, confounding institutional attempts to foster citizen autonomy.

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Law, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in the Antebellum South

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

‘Things’ are not What they Seem: On Persons, Things, Slaves, and the New Abolitionist Movement

‘Things’ are not What they Seem: On Persons, Things, Slaves, and the New Abolitionist Movement

Of Mandarins, Legal Consciousness, and the Cultural Turn in US Legal History: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125

“Walk With Me in White”

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