Enslaved African Americans who escaped to freedom wrote bitterly of the role of law in maintaining the institution of slavery. Harriet Jacob emphasized the law’s refusal to act on behalf of slaves. The enslaved woman or girl had “no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death.” Frederick Douglass focused on the way law did act, turning human beings into property: “By the laws of the country from whence I came, I was deprived of myself – of my own body, soul, and spirit … ” Whether through its action or inaction, slaves recognized the immense power of law in their lives.

Law undergirded an economic system in which human beings were bought, sold, and mortgaged and a political system in which two sections of the United States coexisted profitably, one a slave society and one not. As we know, this coexistence did not last, and it is tempting to read back into the antebellum period an instability in the legal edifice supporting slavery that made its collapse inevitable. Yet, as both Douglass and Jacobs realized, the law worked remarkably well for a long period to subordinate human beings one to another, though not without considerable effort in the face of contradiction, internal conflict, and external challenge. Southern slaves and Northern abolitionists, in very different ways, posed a threat to the law of slavery, and it took work to overcome those threats. Ultimately, however, it was a bloody civil war, and not a legal process, that resolved the contradictions of human property.