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Higher Law And Lincoln's Antislavery Constitutionalism: What It Means To Say The Civil War Was Fought Over Slavery, Joel A. Rogers
Higher Law And Lincoln's Antislavery Constitutionalism: What It Means To Say The Civil War Was Fought Over Slavery, Joel A. Rogers
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The US Civil War was fought over slavery. But what do we really mean when we say that? This paper examines that question, first by exploring the idea of “higher law,” which gained tremendous traction in American society starting around 1850. Proponents of the idea claimed that laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act are immoral; that the immorality of such laws is self-evident, and that such immoral laws should be resisted—sometimes even with violence. Meanwhile, opponents of the idea of higher law were not necessarily in favor of slavery, but they opposed the use of extra-Constitutional means to bring …
"Secession's Moving Foundation": Fugitive Slave Rendition And The Politics Of American Slavery, Evan Turiano
"Secession's Moving Foundation": Fugitive Slave Rendition And The Politics Of American Slavery, Evan Turiano
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the political conflict over fugitive slave rendition from the era of the American Revolution through the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. It pays particular attention to the struggle over the legal rights due to African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves. Slaveholders claimed an absolute property right over accused fugitive slaves and argued that any recognition of legal remedies for accused runaways threatened that right. Free African Americans and their allies in the abolitionist movement asserted that Black people accused of having escaped slavery were due a legal process. This was a vital protection against …
Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine
Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …
Human Capital: The Moral And Political Economy Of Northeastern Abolitionism, 1763–1833, Michael Crowder
Human Capital: The Moral And Political Economy Of Northeastern Abolitionism, 1763–1833, Michael Crowder
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Human Capital” explores the relationships between the moral imperatives of the antislavery movement in the New England and the mid- Atlantic, and their connections to evolving manufacturing and agricultural political economies premised on free labor regimes. Tracing the sweep of history from the British-American imperial crisis through the American Revolution, and into the Early American Republic, “Human Capital” argues that northeasterners like Rhode Island textile capitalist and abolitionist Moses Brown, radical democrats like Thomas Paine, and political economists like Tench Coxe developed visions of capitalism in which chattel slavery’s gradual abolition in the northeastern states acted as a spur to …