Gronningsater, "The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom, by Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania). A description from the Press:

The Rising Generation chronicles the long history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a generation of black New Yorkers. Born into precarious freedom after the American Revolution and reaching adulthood in the lead-up to the Civil War, this remarkable generation ultimately played an outsized role in political and legal conflicts over slavery’s future, influencing both the nation’s path to the Civil War and changes to the US Constitution.

Through exhaustive research in archives across New York State, where the largest enslaved population in the North resided at the time of the American Revolution, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater begins by exploring how English colonial laws shaped late eighteenth-century gradual abolition acts that freed children born to enslaved mothers. The boys and girls affected by these laws were born into a quasi-free legal status. They were technically not enslaved but were nonetheless required to labor as servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of these “children of gradual abolition” found multiple ways to protect and nurture the boys and girls in their midst. They supported and founded schools, formed ties with white lawyers and abolitionists, petitioned local and state officials for better laws, guarded against kidnapping and cruelty, and shaped New York’s evolving identity as a free state. Black fathers used their votes during annual state elections in the early 1800s to influence legislative antislavery efforts. After many but not all black men in the state were disfranchised by a race-based property requirement in 1822, black citizens across New York organized to regain equal suffrage and to expand and protect other crucial, non-gendered features of state citizenship. Women and children were critical participants in these efforts.

Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into midcentury campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable common school education, and the expansion of freedom across the nation.

A selection of advance praise:

"This book is an extraordinary accomplishment of research and writing. Sarah L. H. Gronningsater has immersed herself in countless local archives to give us an entirely new picture of northern black politics in its many forms. With clarity and empathy, The Rising Generation shows how black children, women, and men developed organizing savvy and legal acumen, supported fugitive slaves, demanded access to schools and the courts, and made their voices heard in national politics."—Kate Masur

"The Rising Generation is a book about hope. Meticulously researched and beautifully crafted, it recasts the history of emancipation by foregrounding the activism of ordinary people, particularly black Americans. That past has profound resonance now. By revealing what civic engagement accomplished in the past, this remarkable book also opens up new possibilities today."—Laura F. Edwards

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Pfander on Antislavery Suits as 18th-C Public Law Litigation

James E. Pfander, Northwestern University School of Law, has posted Public Law Litigation in Eighteenth Century America: Diffuse Law Enforcement for a Partisan World, which is forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review:

For some time, the Supreme Court has used standing doctrine to limit the authority of federal courts to entertain private suits aimed at enforcing public norms. In its most recent iteration, TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, the Court invalidated a federal consumer protection statute on the theory that it wrongly empowered suit by individuals who lacked the requisite injury in fact. Shutting down private litigation was said to advance separation of powers values and to protect the enforcement discretion of a unitary executive branch. The Court characterized private enforcement as a novel feature of the 1970s, a time the Court viewed with evident suspicion as one that inaugurated interest group litigation.

In truth, the tradition of interest group enforcement of public norms extends to the earliest days of the Republic. During the 1790s, Quakers and other anti-slavery activists secured federal legislation prohibiting American involvement in the international trade in enslaved people. Like other legislation of that period, the 1794 statute empowered both the federal government and private informers to enforce the law. The ensuing litigation, brought by private informers associated with such groups as the Providence Abolition Society, led to the forfeiture and sale of the offending vessels in the admiralty courts of Rhode Island and elsewhere. Drawing on federal archives, this Article recounts a history in which all three branches of the federal government – Congress, courts, and executive branch officials – viewed private litigation through what were called “popular” actions as an uncontroversial tool for enforcing public norms. One finds no objections based on Article II or III of the Constitution.

--Dan Ernst

The Antislavery Moment: Capitalism, Democracy, and Abolition

Abolitionist Coins (NYPL)

 [We have the following announcement. DRE.]

The Antislavery Moment: Capitalism, Democracy, and Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Princeton University

This conference will feature prominent scholars who work on abolition, anti-slavery politics, capitalism, and slavery, and will attempt to revisit the classic questions about the relationship between the marketplace and abolition in light of the new historiographical trends.

This conference is organized by Professor Matthew Karp, Professor Peter Wrizbicki and the Center for Collaboration History at Princeton University.

Friday, October 7
1:30 – 3:15 p.m.

    Introductory Remarks; Peter Wirzbicki, Princeton University

    Keynote “Conversation”
        James Oakes, The Graduate Center, CUNY
        Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut
        Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago
        Moderator: Sean Wilentz, Princeton University

3:30 – 5:15 p.m. | Panel 1 | The Antislavery Struggle
    Chris Bonner, University of Maryland | “Moses Grandy’s Pursuits of Freedom”
    Sean Griffin, Manhattan College | “Antislavery Struggle, Labor Struggle: Recovering Lost Connections and Missed Opportunities in the Labor-Abolitionist Coalition”
    Kate Masur, Northwestern University | “Poor Laws and Black Codes: Problems of Race, Class, and Mobility in the 19th Century United States”
    Comment: Matthew Karp, Princeton University

Saturday, October 8
9 – 10:45 a.m. | Panel 2 | Antislavery & Democracy
    Sarah Gronningsater, University of Pennsylvania | “Gradual Abolition in Practice: Law, Experience, and the Local Archive”
    Ariel Ron, Southern Methodist University | “The Republicans’ Grassroots Leviathan”
    Alex Gourevitch, Brown University | “Servitude and Self-Emancipation After Slavery”
    Comment: Anton Jäger, KU Leuven

11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. | Panel 3 | Antislavery & Capitalism
    Yesenia Barragan, Rutgers University | “Free Womb Captives and Slavery’s Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Colombia and Spanish South America”
    John Clegg, Harvard University | “The Real Wages of Whiteness: Fear of Slave Competition in the Abolitionist Imagination”
    Comment: Wendy Warren, Princeton University

1:15 – 2:30 p.m. | Panel 4 | Antislavery & Violence
    Kellie Carter Jackson, Wellesley College | “Forcing Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence”
    Isadora Moura Mota, Princeton University | “Radicalizing Atlantic Antislavery: Insurgent Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”
    Comment: Corinna Zeltsman, Princeton University

2:45 – 4 p.m. | Panel 5 | Antislavery & Revolution
    Lenora Warren, Cornell University | “Insurrection and the Oceanic Imaginary”
    Angela Zimmerman, George Washington University | “Conjure and Colonization: Fighting the Empire of ‘Lincoln and them other big emancipator men’”
    Comment: Reena Goldthree, Princeton University

4 – 5 p.m. | Closing Remarks & Conversation
Moderated by Matthew Karp and Peter Wirzbicki

Sovereignty, Law, and Emancipation in the South Atlantic at Emory

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Sovereignty, Law, and Emancipation in the South Atlantic, 1850-1900.  Emory University, February 7, 2020.  Organizers: Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis

12:00-1:00 pm Lunch and Welcome

1:00 pm-3:30 pm Fragile Freedoms: Law and Dispossession in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Mariana Candido, Associate Professor of History, Notre Dame University.  “Legal Changes, Dispossession and Land Commodification in Angola during the 19th Century”

Jon Connolly, Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University.  “Indenture as Free Labor: British Ideologies of Freedom in the Shadow of Cuban Slavery”

Mariana Dias Paes, Researcher, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.  “Lawyers, Courts and Resistance: Fighting Land Dispossession in Colonial Angola”

Anjuli Webster, Graduate Student, Emory University.  “The Dingane-Retief Encounter and the Afterlives of British Abolition in Southern Africa”

Commentators: Kristin Mann (Emory University) and Walter Rucker (Emory University)

3:30 pm-4 pm: Coffee Break

4:00 pm- 6:30 pm Reconfiguring Sovereignty: Subjecthood and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation

Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of History, Emory University.  “From Plantations to Penal Colonies: Militarism in Cuba and Equatorial Guinea, 1840s-1890s”

 Anne Eller, Associate Professor of History, Yale University.  “What Does Independence Mean? Popular Parameters for Caribbean Sovereignty in the 1890s”

Natasha Lightfoot, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University.  “Plassy Lawrence's British Subjecthood and Her Struggle against Reenslavement in the Spanish Caribbean”

Dalia Muller, Associate Professor of History, SUNY-Buffalo.  “‘Free Men and Foreigners’: Representation, Afro-Diasporic Thought and Cuban Politics ca. 1900”

Commentators: David Sartorius (University of Maryland) and Brian Vick (Emory University)

Support has been provided by: The American Society for Legal History; The Hightower Fund; Latin American and Caribbean Studies; The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The James Weldon Johnson Institute, Institute of African Studies, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and the History Department.

Rugemer on slave law in the early Atlantic world

Edward B. Rugemer, Yale University, has published Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World with Harvard University Press. From the publisher:

The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland. These became the most prosperous slave economies in the Anglo-American Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity. Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders’ power that marked the evolution of these societies. Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other. 

In both Jamaica and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance and recurrent slave revolts. Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and state-sponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power. Yet slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by rising abolitionist sentiment and activity in the Anglo-American world. In South Carolina, slaveholders exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition and to expand slavery in the young republic. In Jamaica, by contrast, whites fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British abolitionists who acted through Parliament. 

Rugemer’s comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies in the Atlantic World.

Praise for the book:

 “This is, to my mind, the best history of the Anglo slaveholders and their slaves in the western Caribbean.”—Ira Berlin

“At its heart, this spirited and comprehensive reevaluation of the British imperial project in the Americas is a story of the clashing politics of slave resistance and slaveholders’ repression. It reveals how the slave laws, first initiated in Barbados and later adopted in Jamaica and South Carolina, became progressively more draconian in the face of mounting slave resistance.”—R. J. M. Blackett

“In this significant contribution to the history of slavery, we see how slaveholding regimes developed in response to slave resistance, were transformed in the Age of Revolution, and finally succumbed to concerted action from an array of antislavery forces. Tracing this process through the most profitable and brutal slave societies in Anglo-America, Rugemer sets a new standard for comparative history.”—Vincent Brown

“Edward Rugemer’s vital new book focuses our attention on the relationship between politics and organized violence in the two largest economies of British America. A superb example of comparative history that reveals how the most pernicious institution in the Western Hemisphere contained the seeds of its own demise.”—Peter C. Mancall

Further information is available here.