Legal History Commons^™

States' Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, And The Crisis Of The Union, Paul Finkelman

Akron Law Review

The southern states did not leave the Union because the national government was trampling on their “rights.” The states that left the union never asserted that they were being denied their “states’ rights” —that the national government had obliterated the lines been between national power and state power. Nor did the southern states complain that the national government was too powerful and so it threatened the sovereignty of the state governments. On the contrary, as I set out below, the southern states mostly complained that the northern states were asserting their states’ rights and that the national government was not …

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

Dedication To Freedom, Emily M.S. Houh

Freedom Center Journal

The articles in this issue of The Freedom Center Journal are timely challenges to the persistent efforts to undermine the American values enshrined in the Preamble of the Constitution and the body of the Constitution itself with its three Civil War Amendments.

The student editors of this volume intended the selected contributions to offer readers a nuanced view of our nation’s current identity crisis. The collection is offered in the hope that it will encourage further thinking and discussion about what it means to be part of the American experiment with democratic self-governance in an age of resurgent white supremacy.

The John W. Anderson Slave Pen, Carl B. Westmoreland

Freedom Center Journal

At the end of 18th century America, a series ofevents occurred that forever changed the economic and political status of white Americans. These changes were heavily influenced by the transportation of blacks to this country, the circumstances surrounding their enslavement, and the increasing demand for cotton. America's founders prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans into the United States at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. This prohibition, however, occurred at a time when America was expanding and additional labor was necessary. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 increased the amount of market ready cotton. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size …

Garner Courage, Carl B. Westmoreland

Freedom Center Journal

Robert Garner was born into a slave family on the James Marshall plantation located in Richwood, Kentucky. At 25 years old, Robert executed a plan to free all eight members of his family. They were captured in Cincinnati. His wife, Margaret, determined not to return to slavery, sought to kill her children and then herself. She was able to kill her youngest daughter by slitting her throat. The group members that remained alive were turned over to the U.S. Marshal of Cincinnati for violating the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Knowledge of the Gamers' story and their gruesome capture outraged the …

Dedication To Freedom, Emily Houh

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This special volume of the Freedom Center Journal comprises two issues, both dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center ("Freedom Center"), which first opened its doors in 2004.

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …