Black litigants in the antebellum American South
"This work explores free and enslaved African Americans' involvement in a broad range of civil actions in the Natchez district of Mississippi and Louisiana between 1800 and 1860. Though the antebellum southern courts have long been understood as institutions supporting the class interests...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina Press
2018, [2018]©2018
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| Series: | The John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture
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| Collection: | JSTOR Open Access Books - Collection details see MPG.ReNa |
| Summary: | "This work explores free and enslaved African Americans' involvement in a broad range of civil actions in the Natchez district of Mississippi and Louisiana between 1800 and 1860. Though the antebellum southern courts have long been understood as institutions supporting the class interests and the racial ideologies of the planter and merchant elite, Kimberly Welch shows how black litigants found ways to advocate for themselves even within a racist system. To understand their success, Welch argues that we must understand the language that they used--the language of property, in particular. Because private property and slavery were fundamentally linked in the minds of slave owners, the term 'property' contained a group of metaphors that underwrote a set of white, male claims about autonomy, membership, citizenship, and personhood"-- |
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| Physical Description: | xiv, 306 pages illustrations, maps |
| ISBN: | 9781469636436 9781469659152 1469636433 1469659158 1469636441 |