5 - Life after the Death of Slavery

Summary

This chapter begins an extended exploration of how judges conceptualized the emancipated person. It illuminates the pivotal connection between cases that asked judges to resolve disputes that had grown out of slavery (e.g., contracts for the sale of an enslaved person) and those that required them to consider the rights of newly freed people (e.g., the right to testify). It traces judicial deliberations, analyzes the law’s power to “make and unmake persons,” and considers the effects of that power on freedpeople. As property in persons was destroyed, freedpeople emerged – phoenix-like – from the ashes. In this formulation, emancipation revived the formerly “dead” enslaved person, as she emerged from the wreckage of the peculiar institution.