What I'm reading (September, 2020)
Laura F. Edwards, “James and Hist Striped Velvet Pantaloons: Textiles, Commerce, and the Law in the New Republic,” Journal of American History 107, no. 2 (Sept., 2020), 336-61.
Altering the scale of inquiry and following people’s intimate rela- tionships to textiles in local areas, this article provides a counterpoint to work in the new history of capitalism. In so doing, it engages recent scholarship that has explored the eco- nomic lives of those on the margins, although it takes the insights from that body of work in different directions by emphasizing the importance of law to these people’s economic strategies. Textiles were everywhere in the first half of nineteenth century because their legalities made them more than necessities or consumer goods. People like James did not want cloth and clothing just because they needed them or wanted them, although those considerations were important. These items were desirable because law made them an economic rarity for the majority of Americans at this time: a secure form of property that could be put to use as currency, credit, and capital. (339)
“Masters also had a vested interest in the clothing of the people they claimed to own. Perhaps the most chilling illustration is found in the account book of Hector Davis and Company, one of the largest slave dealers in Richmond, Virginia. Running through the ledger are regular payments to seamstresses who made new clothes for the people the firm sold, so they would fetch a higher price at auction. Enslaved peo- ple were worth more if they were well dressed.” (346)
“People on the legal margins capitalized on the openings made by textiles to find their way into economic dealings that otherwise would have been closed to them. A narrow reading of wives’ legal claims to paraphernalia gave them control at the time of their husbands’ death or allowed wives to dispose of it by will when they died. Legal practice allowed enslaved people to keep their own clothing and gave leeway to poor people with clothing of a quality beyond their social standing. All of these people, however, assumed a far more expansive rendering of those rules and acted as if they should be able to control all textiles and wearing apparel, whether they wore them or not.” (348)
“Local officials faced the legal dilemma posed by people like Sarah Allingham all the time. While she and others had legal claims to textiles, they lacked the standing to enforce them in civil law. So local court officials improvised, shifting the complaints to criminal law, where they used theft as a means of mediating property disputes, without actually labeling them as such.” (355)
Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Asheesh Kapur Siddique, “Governance through Documents: The Board of Trade, Its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World,” Journal of British Studies 59 (April, 2020), 264-90.
Katlyn Marie Carter, “Denouncing Secrecy and Defining Democracy in the Early American Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 40, no. 3 (Fall, 2020), 409-34.
Matthew Crow, “Jefferson’s Whale: Race, Climate, and Commerce in Early America,” Journal of the Early Republic 40, no. 3 (Fall, 2020), 435-64.
Alistair Su, “The Cause of Human Freedom: John Quincy Adams and the Problem of Opium in the Age of Emanciation,” Journal of the Early Republic 40, no. 3 (Fall, 2020), 465-98.
Britt Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 181-230.
Stephen Kantrowicz, More Than Freedom: Fighting For Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
Earl M. Maltz, Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010).
Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Burns: A Problem in Law Enforcement (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1975).
Gordon Barker, The Imperfect Revolution: Anthony Burns and the Landscape of Race in Antebellum America (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2010)
Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns: A History (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856).
Manisha Sinha, “Did He Die an Abolitionist? The Evolution of Abraham Lincoln’s Antislavery,” American Political Thought 4, no. 3 (Summer, 2015), 439-54.
Databases
On the Books: Jim Crow and the Algorithm of Resistance, https://onthebooks.lib.unc.edu/
Archival Collections
Caleb Cushing Papers, Library of Congress
Cases and Statutes
Ex Parte Jenkins, 13 F. Cas. 445 (1853)
Miller v. McQuerry, 17 Fed. Cas. 335 (1853)
U.S. v. Ryecraft, 27 F. Cas. 918 (1852)
U.S. v. Reed, 27 F. Cas. 727 (1852)
Miller v. Mcquerry, 17 F. Cas. 335 (1853)
Oliver v. Weakley, 18 F. Cas. 678 (1853)
Van Metre v. Mitchell, 28 F. Cas. 1036 (1853)
U.S. ex. Rel. Garland v. Morris, 26 F.Cas. 1318 (1854)
Weimert v. Sloane, 29 F. Cas. 599 (1854)
Ex Parte Sifford, 22 F. Cas. 105 (1857)
U.S. v. Cobb, 25 F.Cas. 481 (1857)
Ableman v. Booth, 62 U.S. 506 (1858).
Ex Parte Sifford, 22 F. Cas. 105 (1857)