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Article: Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860.
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- January 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By Thomas D. Morris. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. x, 575. $49.95.)
Thomas D. Morris presents the fullest and most probing explication to date of the policies and practices of the "laws" of slavery in this lucid and learned study. He also gets down to cases--hundreds of them, and in so doing, shows that no single law of slavery ever existed. The laws varied according to time and place and with numerous local permutations. Digging into rarely mined county and municipal records led Morris to discover how much the practice of law might diverge from the stated legal policies. The functioning "law" often was whatever local ...