The Southern debate over slavery / edited by Loren Schweninger.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Schweninger, Loren.

Race and Slavery Petitions Project.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Slavery--Political aspects--Southern States--History--Sources.

Slavery.

Slavery--Social aspects--Southern States--History--Sources.

Slavery--Government policy--Southern States--History--Sources.

Enslaved persons--Legal status, laws, etc--Southern States--History--Sources.

Enslaved persons.

African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc--Southern States--History--Sources.

African Americans.

Politics and government.

Race relations.

African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc.

History.

Enslaved persons--Legal status, laws, etc.

Slavery--Government policy.

Slavery--Social aspects.

Slavery--Political aspects.

Southern States--Race relations--Sources.

Southern States.

Southern States--Politics and government--To 1775--Sources.

Southern States--Politics and government--1775-1865--Sources.

Genre:

Sources.

Physical Description:

volumes : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c2001-

Summary:

An incomparably rich source of period information, The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to their state legislatures between the American Revolution and the Civil War.

These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. Petitioners were compelled to present the most accurate and fully documented case they could because their claims would be subject to public scrutiny and legal verification. Unlike the many reminiscences and autobiographies of the period, these petitions record with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics, common understandings, and legal restrictions and parameters that shaped southern society during this period.

Arranged chronologically, with their original spelling and idiosyncratic phraseology intact, these documents reveal the grim and brutal nature of human bondage, the fears of whites who lived among large concentrations of blacks, and the workings of the complicated legal system designed to control blacks. They tell about the yearning of bondspeople to gain their freedom, the attitudes of freed blacks who were forced to leave the South, and the efforts of African Americans to overcome harsh and restrictive laws. They also underscore the unique situation of free women of color and the reliance of manumitted (formally freed) blacks on their former owners for protection, travel passes, guardianship papers, and reference letters.

Astonishingly intimate and frank, The Southern Debate over Slavery illuminates how slavery penetrated nearly every aspect of southern life and how various groups of southerners responded to the difficulties they confronted as a result of living in a slave society.

Contents:

v. 1. Petitions to Southern legislatures, 1778-1864

v. 2. Petitions to Southern county courts, 1775 - 1867

Notes:

"Race and Slavery Petitions Project"--P. [ii].

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0252026322

9780252026324

OCLC:

44868827