Homicide Justified (eBook)

The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic World

Andrew T. Fede (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
University of Georgia Press (Verlag)
978-0-8203-5111-7 (ISBN)

Infos

This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases—across time, place, and circumstance—to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters’ rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as “property,” from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves.

To explore the conflicts of masters’ rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners’ families, heirs, and creditors.

Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con­sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

Autor

ANDREW T. FEDE is of counsel to the law firm Archer & Greiner, P.C., based in New Jersey, and, since 1986, has been an adjunct professor teaching law courses at Montclair State University. He is the author of Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic World, Roadblocks to Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the United States South, and People without Rights: An Interpretation of the Fundamentals of the Law of Slavery in the U.S. South.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.7.2017
• Reihe/Serie: Southern Legal Studies
• Reihe/Serie: Southern Legal Studies Ser.
• Reihe/Serie: Southern Legal Studies Ser.
• Verlagsort: Athens
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Öffentliches Recht
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
• Schlagworte: Amelioration • American Colonies • Antebellum • Common Law of slavery • comparative law • Crime • Decriminalization • Georgia • John Hoover • law of homicide • North Carolina • Slave homicide • slave owners’ rights • Slavery • slavery law • slave societies • slave violence • South Carolina • Southern law • Southern studies • Tennessee • Virginia
• ISBN-10: 0-8203-5111-3 / 0820351113
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-5111-7 / 9780820351117