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6 - Antislavery in the Age of Rights

Or, the Rights of Slaves Confront the Right to Slaves

from Part I - A Revolution in Rights?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Christopher Leslie Brown
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

This chapter draws attention to the curious ways in which rights and liberty did – and did not – overlap in the context of eighteenth-century abolitionist movements. Many eighteenth-century anti-slavery activists initially focused on improving enslaved people’s condition through legal rights rather than granting them liberty. In Spanish and French empires, there were fairly elaborate legal codes restricting slaveholders from exercising especially cruel and arbitrary punishments or practices. The British Empire was in fact an outlier in its lack of any such restrictions. At the same time, slavery was increasingly regarded as unnatural and a violation of natural rights, a view that triumphed in Somerset v. Steuart (1772). Emancipation in the northern United States also granted some rights before liberty. Conversely, the Haitian Declaration of 1804 spoke of liberty, but not rights, and even liberty was a collective, rather than individual good.

Keywords

slaveryabolitionantislaveryCode NoirMontesquieucoloniesJames SomersetAnthony BenezetrebellionToussaint Louverture
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 140 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Brown, C. L., Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 2006).Google Scholar
Bush, J., “Free to Enslave: The Foundations of Colonial American Slave Law,” Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 5/2 (1993), 417–70.Google Scholar
Davis, D. B., The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1975).Google Scholar
Davis, T. J., “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777,” New England Quarterly 62/2 (1989), 248–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De La Fuente, A., “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22/2 (2004), 339–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fletcher, F. T. H., “Montesquieu’s Influence on Anti-Slavery Opinion in England,” Journal of Negro History 18/4 (1933), 414–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaffield, J. (ed.), The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Geggus, D., “Racial Equality, Slavery and Colonial Secession during the Constituent Assembly,” American Historical Review 94/5 (1989), 1290–1308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghachem, M., The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montesquieu, de Secondat, C. L., Baron de, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Cohler, A. M., Miller, B. C., and Stone, H. S. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Nesbitt, N., Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Polgar, P., Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popkin, J., You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Sharp, G., A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men in England… (London, B. White and R. Horsfield, 1769).Google Scholar
Watson, A., Slave Law in the Americas (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Winter, S., “From Procedural Law to the ‘Rights of Humanity’: Habeas Corpus, ex parte Somerset (1771–72) and the Movement toward Collective Representation in Early British Antislavery Cases,” in Cavanaugh, E. (ed.), Empire and Legal Thought: Ideas and Institutions from Antiquity to Modernity (Leiden, Brill, 2020) pp. 388–424.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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