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Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia by Ted Maris-Wolf (review)

Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia by Ted Maris-Wolf (review) philip a . howard is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston and the author of Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry (Louisiana State University Press, 2015). Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia. By Ted Maris-Wolf. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 266. Paper, $39.95.) Between 1854, shortly before Virginia passed its first general self- enslavement law, and the end of the Civil War, over one hundred free people of color appealed to the state to return them to enslaved status. In this rigorously researched, carefully argued book, Ted Maris-Wolf builds on these anomalous cases to develop a nuanced history of self-enslavement in Virginia, from the Revolution through the Civil War. Most discussions of self-enslavement laws frame them within white southerners’ aggressive efforts to narrow the already precarious legal footing on which free people of color existed in the antebellum South. In contrast, Family Bonds calls for examining the laws within the broad array of strategies free blacks used to evade deportation. Beyond its reinterpretation of self-enslavement, the book provides vivid accounts of how free people of color sustained http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of the Civil War Era University of North Carolina Press

Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia by Ted Maris-Wolf (review)

The Journal of the Civil War Era , Volume 6 (3) – Aug 18, 2016

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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright @ The University of North Carolina Press
ISSN
2159-9807

Abstract

philip a . howard is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston and the author of Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry (Louisiana State University Press, 2015). Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia. By Ted Maris-Wolf. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 266. Paper, $39.95.) Between 1854, shortly before Virginia passed its first general self- enslavement law, and the end of the Civil War, over one hundred free people of color appealed to the state to return them to enslaved status. In this rigorously researched, carefully argued book, Ted Maris-Wolf builds on these anomalous cases to develop a nuanced history of self-enslavement in Virginia, from the Revolution through the Civil War. Most discussions of self-enslavement laws frame them within white southerners’ aggressive efforts to narrow the already precarious legal footing on which free people of color existed in the antebellum South. In contrast, Family Bonds calls for examining the laws within the broad array of strategies free blacks used to evade deportation. Beyond its reinterpretation of self-enslavement, the book provides vivid accounts of how free people of color sustained

Journal

The Journal of the Civil War EraUniversity of North Carolina Press

Published: Aug 18, 2016

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