Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846--1862

by Judith Kelleher Schafer

Overview

Louisiana state law was unique in allowing slaves to contract for their freedom and to initiate a lawsuit for liberty. Judith Kelleher Schafer describes the ingenious and remarkably sophisticated ways New Orleans slaves used the legal system to gain their independence and find a voice in a society that ordinarily gave them none. Showing that remaining free was often as challenging as becoming free, Schafer also recounts numerous cases in which free people of color were forced to use the courts to prove their status. She further documents seventeen free blacks who, when faced with deportation, amazingly sued to enslave themselves. Schafer’s impressive detective work achieves a rare feat in the historical profession—the unveiling of an entirely new facet of the slave experience in the American South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807128800
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2003
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Judith Kelleher Schafer is the author of several books, including Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana and Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans. She lives in New Orleans with her husband.

Editorial Reviews

Written by one of the outstanding legal historians of the antebellum South, this book is based on comprehensive and exhaustive examination of hundreds of court cases and related legal documents. It is, simply put, legal history at its best. . . . It should be mandatory reading as a case study of how historians can use legal records as the basis for crafting compelling social history. Highly recommended.

Choice

Vital to those interested in the legal history of slavery and emancipation.

Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies

For over two decades, Judith Kelleher Schafer has been mining Louisiana’s antebellum judicial records, hauling up the golden nuggets buried in their stories, and molding them into revealing vignettes of slave society in the Old South. In the present volume, she continues the story down to 1861, focusing on free blacks in New Orleans. . . . Out of her case files step individual slaves demanding manumission, and free blacks defending their freedom, in a period of mounting white antagonism toward them in New Orleans and throughout the slave South. . . . Schafer’s constant effort to keep contemporary individual free blacks and slaves in the forefront makes her book about people rather than vague forces or concepts. It deserves a wide audience.

H-Net Book Review

Vital to those interested in the legal history of slavery and emancipation.

Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies