The Trouble with Minna (eBook)

A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North

Hendrik Hartog (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
208 Seiten
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
9781469640891 (ISBN)

Infos

In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debateabout care as a "e;mere voluntary courtesy"e;became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "e;good Samaritans."e; Using Minna's case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free.In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.

Autor

Hendrik Hartog is Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus at Princeton University and author of Public Property and Private Power.

Produkt-Details

• Zusatzinfo: 2 maps, notes, index
• Verlagsort: Chapel Hill
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
• Schlagworte: “a mere voluntary courtesy” • arson • Care • Conflicts of law • Consideration doctrines • contract law • Elizabeth-Town, New Jersey • Ferry boats on the Hudson • Good Samaritans in the law • Gradual emancipation in New Jersey • Interstate slave trade • Kidnapping controversy in New Jersey • Legal culture • Manumission laws • negotiorum gestio • New Jersey lawyers and judges • New Jersey legal history, 1790-1860 • New Jersey Supreme Court • New York legal history • poor relief • Presumption of slavery • Property Law • Slave abolition • Slavery • Slave traders • Somerset doctrine
• ISBN-13: 9781469640891 / 9781469640891