“Beings of an Inferior Order”

This chapter discusses the role of the legal system, including the Supreme Court, in upholding the constitutionality of slavery. It first examines the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842, in which the Supreme Court reversed the conviction in state court of Edward Prigg, a professional slave-catcher, for kidnapping Margaret Morgan, who escaped from slavery in Maryland to the free state of Pennsylvania. Ruling that state officials could not hinder enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the Court also held that state officials could decline to aid slave-catchers, leading to mass demonstrations in Boston over the “rendition” of escaped slaves George Latimer and Anthony Burns. The chapter includes a recounting of the infamous Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney held that no Black person was a citizen and that Blacks were “an inferior order of beings” who had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of the impact of the Dred Scott ruling on the presidential campaign of 1860, in which Abraham Lincoln denounced the decision and provoked the slave states to secede from the Union and launch the Civil War.

“It’s enough to survive through this hell to make ourselves immortal in the eyes of our descendants:” Myal, death and mourning in Orlando Patterson’s Die the Long Day

Die the Long Day narrates the 24 hours following the flight, capture, and brutal murder of Quasheba, a fugitive slave, on an 18th-century Jamaican plantation. Quasheba is remembered, retroactively, for her defiance of, despite ultimate defeat by, both the extreme gendered violence of the plantation and the paternalism of the narrative. The climax of this novel is Quasheba’s funeral, on which her community insists in accordance with their communal, African religious (Myal) rites. In these following pages I will consider how Quasheba’s spirit galvanizes this community as much as it may threaten to destroy it, and how this narrative places Obeah/Myal at the center of spiritual survival in the face of ever-present physical—and social—death during and after slavery, and at the center of strategies for the survival of its aftereffects.

5. Habeas corpus in the early United States

This chapter details the creation of American federal courts and their vesting with habeas jurisdiction. It likewise explores the failure of Thomas Jefferson to convince his Congress to enact a suspension to address the so-called Burr Conspiracy and how even the return of the British in the War of 1812 did not lead to a suspension, revealing an early reluctance to invoke the dramatic authority. The chapter concludes by exploring the continuing importance of the common law writ as a writ of liberty in slave cases, highlighting how judges in Northern abolitionist states used the common law writ to frustrate fugitive slave laws while often relying upon Lord Mansfield’s opinion in Somerset’s Case as support for a robust habeas writ in this context. The chapter concludes by noting that these cases laid the groundwork for a future expansive role for the writ that would come during the American Reconstruction period.