The Trouble with Minna

In his exploration of an 1840 New Jersey Supreme Court case, Hendrik Hartog takes readers on a journey into the confusing, cruel, and contradictory legal world of how one, and, by implication, other northern states' gradual abolition laws perpetuated slavery even while slavery was in decline. As scholars have repeatedly stressed, gradual abolition laws freed no one. The children born after the passage of the law were “free” but remained the “servant,” either of the mother's owner or that owner's executors, or were bound out by the overseers of the poor until adulthood. For New Jersey, the last state to pass a gradual abolition law in 1804, adulthood meant the age of twenty-one for females and twenty-five for males. Clear in all gradual abolition laws is that the legislation protected the financial interests of slave owners and the state's white citizens and generally ignored even the basic needs and interests of the enslaved

Emancipation · Legislation · Political science · Politics · Servant · Sociology · State (computer science · Supreme court · White (mutation · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law