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Double Character - Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Paperback, New edition)
Loot Price: R1,032
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Double Character - Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Paperback, New edition)
Series: Studies in the Legal History of the South
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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This groundbreaking study of the law and culture of slavery in the
antebellum Deep South takes readers into local courtrooms where
people settled their civil disputes over property. Buyers sued
sellers for breach of warranty when they considered slaves to be
physically or morally defective; owners sued supervisors who
whipped or neglected slaves under their care. How, asks Ariela J.
Gross, did communities reconcile the dilemmas such trials raised
concerning the character of slaves and masters? Although slaves
could not testify in court, their character was unavoidably at
issue - and so their moral agency intruded into the courtroom. In
addition, says Gross, ""wherever the argument that black character
depended on management by a white man appeared, that white man's
good character depended on the demonstration that bad black
character had other sources."" This led, for example, to physicians
testifying that pathologies, not any shortcomings of their master,
drove slaves to became runaways. Gross teases out other threads of
complexity woven into these trials: the ways that legal disputes
were also affairs of honor between white men; how witnesses and
litigants based their views of slaves' character on narratives
available in the culture at large; and how law reflected and shaped
racial ideology. Combining methods of cultural anthropology,
quantitative social history, and critical race theory, ""Double
Character"" brings to life the law as a dramatic ritual in people's
daily lives, and advances critical historical debates about law,
honor, and commerce in the American South.
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