Creating Law through Regulating Intimacy
The Case of Slave Marriage in Nineteenth-Century New York and the United States
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12073566 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lauren Feldman (0000-0002-3057-9602), L A Feldman (Johns Hopkins University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 119-143 |
| Publication date | 2023-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Law and History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0738-2480 • E-ISSN: 1939-9022 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0738248023000032 |
| OpenAlex | W4361003996 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 32 |
This article argues that American jurists fashioned new understandings about the capacity of states to legislate about marriage through regulating the intimate lives of enslaved and newly freed individuals. This article does so through analyzing the creation and impact of a little-studied 1809 law in New York that legalized the marriages of enslaved people—while individuals were still enslaved—as part of the state's process of gradual emancipation, which occurred from 1799 to 1827. In New York, by legalizing enslaved people's marriages, jurists privatized financial liabilities within soon-to-be freed families. The law stood at odds with national juridical understanding about marital regulation. Jurists in the early republic were uncertain about whether states could legislate about matrimony. Southern states after the Civil War then cited and replicated New York's logic in legislating to legalize the marriages of freedpeople, similarly privatizing financial claims within families. In the cases of both New York and national emancipation, jurists, in choosing privatization, foreclosed possibilities for a different or broader vision of state support for freedpeople, such as reparations. After making marital laws about slavery, both New York and Southern states created and/or tightened their marriage laws, further inscribing understandings of the marital family into American governance. This piece contributes to historiographies of slavery, the American state, and intimacy
Corporate governance · Economics · Emancipation · Family law · Odds · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law
Governing the hearth
The end of reform
The people's welfare
The Black family in slavery and freedom, 1750-1925
Man and Wife in America
A Government Out of Sight
Public Vows
Philanthropy, Self Help, and Social Control
Surviving Southampton
In the Shadow of Slavery
To ’Joy My Freedom
From Bondage to Contract
Birthright Citizens
Wicked Flesh
Making a New Deal
The Straight State
Back into the Days of Slavery”
Sweet Taste of Liberty
Gendered Strife and Confusion
The Allure of the Advertisement
Bound in wedlock
Voices of the Enslaved
British Statutes in American Law, 1776-1836
Slavery in the American Republic
Record of Slave Manumissions in New York During the Colonial and Early National Periods
The Settlers' Empire
| Highly cited | No |
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