Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
South, property rights, against the other, racial hierarchy. In so doing, black litigants forced judges “to face head-on the contradictions in the val- ues they held most dear—specifically, the tensions between race and prop - erty” (103). Such tensions, she concludes, “made slave systems by turns sustainable and unstable” (20). How unstable is a question that Welch grapples with throughout, and it is a question that other scholars will also want to take up in light of her stimulating work. Welch argues that cases involving free black prop- erty holders made white supremacy unstable by forcing “judges to choose between the two most important foundations of their society: racial hier- archy and private property” (104). She sees cases where judges ruled in favor of black litigants as instances where property proved more impor- tant than race. But other interpreters might wonder whether, by choosing to recognize the rights claimed by some free black litigants, white jurists ultimately sustained, more than destabilized, a system built on white supremacy and slaveholders’ property. After all, in the face-to-face soci- ety that sometimes allowed black litigants to appeal to their local reputa- tion in court, most black residents remained enslaved. As Justin Behrend
The Journal of the Civil War Era – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Sep 3, 2019
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.