Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle
2011; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0144039x.2011.588468
ISSN1743-9523
Autores Tópico(s)Colonialism, slavery, and trade
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, eds., Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008); Josep M. Fradera, 'L'Esclavage et la logique constitutionnelle des empires', Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 3 (2008): 533–560. 'As for slaves and bondmen, we have none; naie, such is the privilege of our countrie by the especiall grace of God, and bountie of our princes, that if anie come hither from other realms, so soone as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterlie removed from them, wherein we resemble (not the Germans, who had slaves also, though such as in respect of the slaves of other countries might well be reputed free, but the old Indians and the Taprobanes, who supposed it a great injury to Nature to make or suffer them to be bond, whom she in hir wonted course doth product and bring forth free).' Raphael Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles … now newlie augmented and continued (with manifold matters of singular note and worthie memorie) to the yeare 1586 (London: Henry Denham, 1587), bk. 2, chap. 5, 163, Early English Books Online, ebbo.chadwyck.com (accessed 26 May 2010). Interestingly, the terms 'free soil' and 'free air' do not appear generally before the nineteenth century, though evidence of persistent legal traditions freeing slaves who cross territorial borders, previously studied as the 'freedom principle' by Sue Peabody and Seymour Drescher, can be found. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ix–x, 23–24, 28, 35, 66–67, 93–97, 100–105, 134, 238, 398. For an earlier survey of the free soil principle, see also Sue Peabody, 'Slavery, Freedom, Statehood and the Law in the Atlantic World, 1700–1888', in Democracy and Culture in the Transatlantic World: Third Interdisciplinary Conference, October 2004, The Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies, Maastricht, The Netherlands (Växjö, Sweden: Växjö University, 2005). We offer the term 'free soil' in lieu of the more generic term 'freedom principle', but it should not be confused with the short-lived US antebellum political party by the same name. See Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, new ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 81ff. For the most recent historiography on the Somerset case, see George Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), chap. 1; Justin Buckley Dyer, 'After the Revolution: Somerset and the Antislavery Tradition in Anglo-American Constitutional Development', Journal of Politics 71, no. 4 (2009): 1422–1434; 'Forum: Somerset's Case Revisited', Law and History Review 24, no. 3 (2006): 601–672, including: George Van Cleve, 'Somerset's Case and Its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective'; Daniel J. Hulsebosch, 'Nothing but Liberty: Somerset's Case and the British Empire'; Ruth Paley, 'Imperial Politics and English Law: The Many Contexts of Somerset'; and George Van Cleve, 'Mansfield's Decision: Toward Human Freedom'. Our analysis here differs from Van Cleve's approach by considering the free soil tradition not only as a product of formal jurisprudence, but as the intersection of popular common traditions with more formal statist iterations. Drescher, Abolition, 101–104. The prominent pro-slavery Georgia jurist Thomas R.R. Cobb devoted several chapters of his 1858 magnum opus to the legal status of 'slaves escaping or carried into other states', thereby refuting the validity of free soil in US law in the wake of the 1857 US Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, in An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 117–225. The antebellum rejection of free soil was a major influence in the development of the principle of comity in US law. See Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009). The citations in the early nineteenth-century summary of the Somerset case are an invaluable point of entrée into continental free soil traditions: 'The Case of James Sommersett, a Negro, on a Habeas Corpus, King's Bench: 12 George III, A.D. 1771–72', in A Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 20, 1771–1777, by Thomas Bayly Howell (London: T.C. Hansard, 1814), columns 23–82. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (1947; Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). Charles Verlinden distinguishes between the Mediterranean cultures' proximity to Muslim slavery versus northern Europe's relative isolation from the Islamic world in Esclavage dans l'Europe médiévale, 2 vols. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1955–1977), 1: 18. Alan Watson also contrasts northern Europe's lack of a slave law tradition with that of the Roman world in Slave Law in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). Drescher, Abolition, 1, 23–24, 28, 35, 66–67, 93–96, 97, 100, 101–102, 104, 105, 134, 238, 398. Travis Glasson, '"Baptism doth not bestow Freedom": Missionary Anglicanism, Slavery, and the Yorke-Talbot Opinion, 1701–1730', William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2010): 279–318; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Werner Sollors, vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 2001), chaps. 4–5, 67–72; Sue Peabody, 'There Are No Slaves in France': The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 37–56. On the French decrees of 1716 and 1738, see Peabody, 'There Are No Slaves'; for 1836, see Sue Peabody, 'Furcy, la question raciale et le "sol libre de France": une micro-histoire', Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 6 (2009): 1305–1334. On the Portuguese proclamation of 1761, see Nogueira da Silva and Grinberg in this issue. On the Spanish court decisions, see Aurelia Martín Casares and Margarita García Barranco in this issue. Donald V. Macdougall, 'Habeas Corpus, Extradition and a Fugitive Slave in Canada', Slavery & Abolition 7, no. 2 (1986): 118–128; David M. Turley, '"Free Air" and Fugitive Slaves: British Abolitionists versus Government over American Fugitives, 1834–61', in Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, ed. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), 163–172; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), 142–177; Sean Kelley, '"Mexico in His Head": Slavery and the Texas–Mexico Border, 1810–1860', Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (2004): 709–723. On Uruguay, see Joseph P. Younger, '"Naturals of This Republic": Slave Law, Sovereignty and the Legal Politics of Citizenship in the Río de la Plata Borderlands, 1845–1864', Law and History Review 29 (forthcoming); Keila Grinberg and Rachel da Silveira Caé, 'Slavery, Frontier and Diplomatic Relations: Brazil–Uruguay, 1840–1860', in The Politics of Second Slavery: Conflict and Crisis on the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Frontier, ed. Dale Tomich, Rafael Marquese and Ricardo Salles (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming). On Pennsylvania, see Richard Newman in this issue and Kirsten Sword, 'Remembering Dinah Nevil: Strategic Deceptions in Eighteenth-Century Antislavery', Journal of American History 97, no. 2 (2010): 315–343; Keith P. Griffler, Frontline of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); Stephen Middleton, 'Cincinnati and the Fight for the Law of Freedom in Ohio, 1830–1856', Locus 4, no. 1 (1991): 59–73; Thomas J. Davis, 'Napoleon v. Lemmon: Antebellum Black New Yorkers, Antislavery, and Law', Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 33, no. 1 (2009): 27–46. Max Weber, The City, trans. and ed. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 94. Ernst Werner, Stadtluft macht frei: Früscholstik und bürgerliche Emanzipation in der ersten Hälfte des 12. Jahrhunderts, Sitzungsberichte der Sächsischen Akademir der Wissenshaftern zu Leipzig, Philiologisch-Historische Klasse, vol. 118, bk. 5 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1976); Bern von Hans Strahm, 'Stadtluft macht frei', in 'Das Problem der Freiiheit in der Deutschen und Schweizerischen Geschichte', special issue, Vorträge und Forschungen 2 (1981): 103–121. Gillian Weiss, Back from Barbary: Mediterranean Slavery and the Rise of France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City: From Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century (London: Longman, 1997), 157. Linda M. Rupert, 'Marronage, Manumission and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean', Slavery & Abolition 30, no. 3 (2009): 361–382; Jane Landers, 'Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790', Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1984): 296–313. Keila Grinberg, ' Slavery, Manumission and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Reflections on the Law of 1831 and the "Principle of Liberty " on the Southern Frontier of the Brazilian Empire', in 'Slavery, Citizenship and the State in Classical Antiquity and the Modern Americas ' , special issue, European Review of History/Revue Européenne d'Histoire 16, no. 3 (2009): 401–411. Sue Peabody, '"Free upon Higher Ground": Saint-Domingue Slaves' Suits for Freedom in US Courts, 1792–1830', in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 261–283. Ada Ferrer, 'Between Kings and Constitutions: Haiti and Free Soil in the Revolutionary Atlantic' (unpublished manuscript). David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 499–500. Nevertheless, the New Orleans District Court continued to uphold the freedom of slaves who had travelled to free territory, especially France, prior to 1846. Judith Kelleher Shaeffer, Becoming and Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 16; Dennis K. Boman, 'The Dred Scott Case Reconsidered: The Legal and Political Context in Missouri', American Journal of Legal History 44, no. 4 (2000): 405–428. Finkelman, Imperfect Union, 4. Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 28–29; Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 254–256. Alexandre Ferdinand de Bessner, Governor of Guyane, 'Mémoire sommaire sur la Colonie de Cayenne et la Guyane François', 1774, Centre des Archives d'Outremer, Aix-en-Provence, C14/42/192, cited in Barbara Traver, 'Populating El Dorado: The French Enlightenment and Colonization Schemes for Guyane' (PhD diss., Washington State University, forthcoming). James Simeone, Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 8. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSue PeabodySue Peabody is Edward G. Meyer Professor of Liberal Arts in the Department of History, Washington State University, Vancouver, WA 98685, USA.Keila GrinbergKeila Grinberg is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and of the Foundation of Research of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), Brazil. Email: keila.grinberg@gmail.com
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