LibGuides: History Vault: Slavery and the Law

Slavery and the Law

Slavery and the Law (Module 4)

Slavery and the Law features petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses between 1775 and 1867. These petitions were collected by Loren Schweninger over a four year period from hundreds of courthouses and historical societies in 10states and the District of Columbia. The petitions document the realities of slavery at the most immediate local level and with amazing candor. Slavery and the Law also includes theimportant State Slavery Statutes collection, a comprehensive record of the laws governing American slavery from 1789-1865.

State Slavery Statutes

Laws pertaining to slaves and slavery.

Law of Freedom and Bondage

Law and slavery in the U.S. and laws related to runaway slaves
See detailed table of contents beginning pg. 6 of PDF.

The volumes contain brief abstracts of many hundreds of state laws passed by general assemblies on the subject of race and slavery in the United States

Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery & The Negro

Slave marriage, slave trade, manumission, and wills, legal case summaries for Tennessee
Slaves, and civil and criminal procedure, legal case summaries for Michigan
The Amistad cases, pp.25
Interested in another account of the slave uprising aboard the ship Amistad? Read about in the cases from Connecticut.

Petitions to State Legislatures

Race and Slavery Petitions Project, Series I descriptive information
Andrew Gray states that his twenty-one-year-old slave Charles was arrested and jailed for theft in 1809. ...
William G. Harding, the guardian of the only child of the late William Harding,
asks permission to sell Maria and her six children to Texas -bound Daniel Maurice Harding, owner of Maria's husband. ...

Petitions to Southern County Courts

Sarah Haney writes that before her husband's death, one William McDonald induced him to purchase a piece of land, using a slave "boy," Abram, as down payment.
... Sarah Haney maintains that her husband "in his lifetime had been for a long time sick & debilitated so much so that his sickness had almost entirely destroyed his bodily & mental powers" and therefore was "utterly incapable & unfit to transact even common business." She asks the court to declare the sale null and void and order McDonald to return Abram.
Josiah Conley is the executor of the estate of his late mother, Nancy Conley. He declares that the last will and testament of his mother "liberated & set free" a slave woman named Harriet.
... It is Conley's hope that "the humane provision of the law, allowing persons who are aged or diseased so that they could not with safety go to Liberia, to remain in the state be extended to her."