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University, Court, and Slave reveals long-forgotten connections between universities and pro-slavery thought. Proslavery faculty wrote about the economic and historical importance of slavery and helped shape a proslavery jurisprudence that made it harder to free slaves and pushed the South towards Civil War.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I: The Contours of Academic Proslavery Thought
- 1. The Rebel and the Professor: Nat Turner and Thomas Dew
- 2. Proslavery Academic Thought in the 1840s and 1850s
- 3. The Southern Scholar: College Literary Addresses
- 4. Brown University's President Confronts Slavery
- 5. The Chancellor, the Slave, and the Student
- Part II: Connecting Moral Philosophy and Legal Thought
- 6. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: The Grammar of Proslavery Thought
- 7. The Novelist and the Jurist: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Jurisprudence of Sentiment
- Part III: The Core of Southern Legal Thought
- 8. Beyond State v. Mann: Thomas Ruffin's Jurisprudence
- 9. Joseph Henry Lumpkin: Industrialism and Slavery in the Old South
- 10. Proslavery Jurisprudence: Thomas Reade Roots Cobb's An Inquiry Into the Law of Negro Slavery
- 11. "The dictate of a wise policy": Precedent, Utility, Progress, Humanity, and the Empirical in Antebellum Jurisprudence
- 12. Slavery, Property, and Constitutionalism in the Secession Debates
About the author
Alfred L. Brophy is the Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law at University of North Carolina and the author of Reparations Pro and Con and Reconstructing the Dreamland.
Summary
University, Court, and Slave reveals long-forgotten connections between universities and pro-slavery thought. Proslavery faculty wrote about the economic and historical importance of slavery and helped shape a proslavery jurisprudence that made it harder to free slaves and pushed the South towards Civil War.
Additional text
A learned treatise about learned treatises, University, Court, and Slave introduces readers to the professors and jurists who sustained American slavery. Reaching far beyond the standard intellectual histories of pro-slavery thought, Brophy recovers the potent interplay of slaveholding jurisprudence and university curricula in protecting property rights in people and shaping the nature of liberal market society in the nation as a whole. This is a major accomplishment and a significant contribution to the revitalized study of slavery and capitalism.
