1. Published works on the legal condition of slaves in early Louisiana include Oppenheim, Leonard, “The Law of Slaves: A Comparative Study of the Roman and Louisiana Systems,” Tulane Law Review 14 (1940): 384–406Google Scholar; Taylor, Joe Gray, Negro Slavery In Louisiana (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Rankin, David C., “The Tannenbaum Thesis Reconsidered: Slavery and Race Relations in Antebellum Louisiana,” Southern Studies 18 (Spring 1979): 5–31Google Scholar; Allain, Mathé, “Slave Policies in French Louisiana,” Louisiana History 21 (1980): 127–37Google Scholar; Brasseaux, Carl A., “The Administration of Slave Regulations in French Louisiana, 1724–1766,” Louisiana History 21 (1980): 139–58Google Scholar; Baade, Hans W., “The Law of Slavery in Spanish Luisiana,” in Louisiana's Legal Heritage, ed. Haas, Edward F. and Macdonald, Robert R. (Pensacola, Fla., 1983), 43–86Google Scholar; Schafer, Judith Kelleher, “The Long Arm of the Law: Slave Criminals and the Supreme Court in Antebellum Louisiana,” Tulane Law Review 60 (1986): 1247–68Google Scholar; Ingersoll, Thomas N., “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718–1812” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 48 (1991): 173–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giraud, Marcel, A History of French Louisiana, vol. 5, The Company of the Indies, 1723–1731 (Baton Rouge, La., 1991), 318–29.Google Scholar

2. Rankin, “The Tannenbaum Thesis Reconsidered,” 14.

3. It did not seem to be necessary to pass such laws in the earliest days of the French colonies (also true in the English colonies) because everyone knew that black slaves were degraded by definition, by a tradition established in the fifteenth century. The laws found on the books in the French colonies before the Code Noir of 1685 clearly indicate this assumption; see Petit, Emilien, Traité sur le Gouvernement des Esclaves, 2 vols. (Paris, 1777), 1:1–9.Google Scholar See also McColley, Robert, “Slavery in Virginia, 1619–1660: A Reexamination,” in New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp, ed. Abzug, Robert H. and Maizlish, Stephen E. (1986).Google Scholar

4. Las Siete Partidas, trans. Scott, Samuel P. (Chicago, 1931).Google Scholar

5. Ibid., 539–40, 740–41; See Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1947), 48–56Google Scholar; Klein, Herbert S., Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago, 1967), 57–77Google Scholar; Goveia, Elsa V., The West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century (Birkenhead, Eng., 1970).Google Scholar The best short introduction to the subject is Genovese's, Eugene D. “Materialism and Idealism in the History of Negro Slavery in the Americas,” Journal of Social History 1 (1968): 371–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Recopilacion de Leyes de Los Reynos de Las Indias, 3 vols., 4th ed. (Madrid, 1791), 2:360–70.

7. Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, 62–65, 82–88, 98–99.

8. Critics include Harris, Marvin, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York, 1964), 70–96Google Scholar; Sio, Arnold A., “Interpretations of Slavery: The Slave Status in the Americas,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7 (1965): 289–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, David B., The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), 223–88Google Scholar; Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore, 1971)Google Scholar; Wax, Darold D., “Whither the Comparative History of Slavery?” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 80 (1972): 89–93Google Scholar; several writers in Toplin, Robert B., ed., Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America (Westport, Ct, 1974)Google Scholar; Schwartz, Stuart B., “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684–1745,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (1974): 603–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rice, C. Duncan, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery (Baton Rouge, La., 1976), 63–101, 266–87Google Scholar; Rankin, “The Tannenbaum Thesis Reconsidered”; and Nash, Gary B., Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1982), 152–63Google Scholar;

9. For the most recent attempt to pursue the Roman remnants in New World slave law, see Watson, Alan, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens, Ga., 1989).Google Scholar For an argument that the slave law of the United States owes little to Roman or civil law, see Morris, Thomas D.,” ‘Villeinage … as it existed in England, reflects but little light on our subject’: The Problem of the ‘Sources’ of the Slave Law,” The American Journal of Legal History 32 (1988): 95–137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a fine essay demonstrating that the origin of Anglo-American slave law lies in the peculiar constitutional status of the British colonies, see Bush, Jonathan A., “Free to Enslave: The Foundations of Colonial American Slave Law,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5 (1993): 417–70.Google Scholar Nonetheless, the analysis adopts the mistaken assumption that the slave laws of other colonies resulted from “the wholesale reception of Roman slave law” (425).

10. In a footnote, he suggests that the French “system of slavery” was intermediate between the two extremes represented by the most severe (the Dutch) and the least severe (the Portuguese); see Slave and Citizen, 65.

11. For the context of the times, see Goubert, Pierre, Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, trans. Carter, Anne (New York, 1972), 79–172Google Scholar; Wolf, John B., Louis XIV (New York, 1968), 182–425.Google Scholar

12. Jews were banned from France by royal decree in the thirteenth century; Louis XIII decreed another ban in 1615 because some had returned, but this decree was not specifically extended to the colonies until 1685; see Saint-Méry, Médéric Moreau de, Loix et Constitutions des Colonies Francoises de l'Amérique sous le Vent, 6 vols. (Paris, 1784–1990), 1:13.Google Scholar

13. Peytraud, Lucien, L'Esclavage aux Antilles Francoises avant 1789 d'après des Documents lnédits des Archives Coloniales (Paris, 1897), 150–57.Google Scholar Peytraud grants that the code could claim to be a humane milestone of sorts, regardless of its authors' intentions.

14. Ibid., 174–77. The policy of exclusion was not completely successful, since some Protestants and Jews settled in Louisiana and other French colonies; see O'Neill, Charles E., Church and State in French Colonial Louisiana: Policy and Politics to 1732 (New Haven, 1966), 256–82.Google Scholar

15. “Le Code Noir,” March 1685, in Recueils de Réglemens, Édits, Declarations et Arrèts, Concernant le Commerce, VAdministration de la Justice, & la Police des Colonies Francoises de l'Amérique, & les Engages, Avec Le Code Noir, et I'Addition audit Code, 2 vols., 2d ed. (Paris, 1765), 2:67–83; see also Petit, Traité sur le Gouvernement des Esclaves 1:10–30; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et Constitutions 1:414–24. Numerous local statutes representing precursors of the main provisions in the Code Noir are also found in ibid., 68, 73, 83, 117–22, 306–7, 388. For an English translation of the code, see Long, Edward, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 3:921–34.Google Scholar The codes of 1685 and 1724 are found in Sala-Molins, Louis, Le Code Noir, ou le Calvaire de Canaan (Paris, 1987).Google Scholar

16. Giraud, Marcel, Histoire de la Louisiane Française, vol. 3, L'Époque de John Law, 1717–1720 (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar; Price, Jacob M., France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973), 1:196–220, 302–28.Google Scholar

17. The total is tabulated from Conrad, Glenn R., trans, and comp., The First Families of Louisiana, 2 vols. (Baton Rouge, La., 1970), 1:57–64.Google Scholar The community of New Orleans was coextensive with the parish surrounding Saint Louis Church in the eighteenth century, encompassing the major plantation region of lower Louisiana. See, for example, [Anonymous], Memoir on the Condition of Louisiana, 1746, Archives Nationales, Archives des Colonies, C13A, c. 30, fol. 256, for a census of Louisiana in which “New Orleans” is denned as the region lying between German Coast and the mouth of the Mississippi River. None of the many other population estimates for this community are based on this, its members' own contemporary definition. The village denoted by cartographers as “Nouvelle Orleans” was the hub of a system of closely integrated plantation neighborhoods, none of which had institutional autonomy.

18. Recueils de Réglemens 2:111–28; see also Petit, Traité sur le Gouvernement des Esclaves 1:99–104, for the nine articles he believed to be significantly different from the code of 1685. For a paraphrase in English of a large portion of the code, which is generally accurate but not entirely reliable, see Gayarré, Charles, History of Louisiana, 4 vols., 5th ed. (Gretna, La., 1965), 2:appendix.Google Scholar

19. In the Alabama Slave Code of 1852, for example, one of the most comprehensive of all codes, of 159 total clauses, 110 are aimed specifically at the behavior of masters and others whites, and eight others provide penalties for either masters or slaves. Only twenty-six are aimed at slaves (including two that target slaves and free blacks collectively), and fifteen restrict the status and activities of free blacks; see A Documentary History of Slavery in North America, ed. Rose, Willie Lee (New York, 1976), 178–96.Google Scholar

20. Martin, Gaston, Histoire de I'Esclavage dans les Colonies Francoises (Paris, 1948), 27–29.Google Scholar

21. The 1724 code takes the responsibility for Christianizing slaves out of the hands of officials and puts it in the hands of the planters (Article 2 in both codes), which would give planters greater power to decide whether or not to permit or engage in an activity many of them regarded as dangerous. As for the Sabbatarian clause, in 1686 the crown rescinded the restriction in Articles 6 and 7 of the 1685 code, in response to planters' protest on this point, in order to permit them to send slaves to market on Sundays and holidays; see Petit, Traité sur le Gouvernement des Esclaves 1:30–31.

22. The code of 1685 (in Articles 22, 23, and 25) specifies weekly rations of manioc flour (or cassavas, or the equivalent) and salt beef (or fish, or the equivalent) for adults and half rations for children under ten years of age, plus the yearly provision of two linen suits or four aulnes of cloth. Once again, the change in the code of 1724 augments the personal power of masters to determine local policy.

23. Watson's assertion that the slaves in French colonies lacked this right in contrast to those under Spanish law is incorrect; see Slave Law in the Americas, 86.

24. The code of 1685 assesses masters six sous per day for the maintenance of an abandoned slave who is seized; the new code raises this to eight sous and provides for a judicial lien on the plantation to ensure payment.

25. In the code of 1685 the corresponding clause on corporal discipline (Article 42) specifies “masters,” whereas Article 38 of the 1724 code has “our subjects of any status,” which would appear to be a technical improvement in favor of slaves. If so, it is the only one and a minor one.

26. The prohibition of donations is a change from the corresponding clause in the code of 1685 (Article 57), which includes no such qualification.

27. One case in the record suggests that slaves were aware of the rule by which a slave mother and her offspring by the master could be seized by authority. The clergy probably revealed this law in the course of their campaign against concubinage. See Declaration by Pierre Garcon, June 29, 1737, Louisiana Historical Collection, Louisiana State Museum, Old Mint, New Orleans, concerning his imprisonment of the runaway Jeanneton; see also Declaration by Garcon, August 23, 1736, in which he nullifies his provisional emancipation of Jeanneton, presumably explaining her behavior the following summer, when she threatened to declare that she was pregnant by him and ran away.

28. Raphael to Raguet, May 15, 1725, Archives des Colonies, C13A, c. 8, fols. 402–3v. SisterMiceli, Mary Veronica, “The Influence of the Roman Catholic Church on Slavery in Colonial Louisiana under French Domination, 1718–1763” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1979), 65–96.Google Scholar Everywhere priests reported that masters refused to send slaves for instruction; on Guyane, for example, see Father Panier to Secretary of State Maurepas, October 30, 1736, Archives des Colonies, C14, c. 16, fol. 264; Girod-Chantrans, Justin, Voyage d'un Suisse dans Differentes Colonies d'Amérique pendant la Dernière Guerre (Neuchatel, 1785), 195–201.Google Scholar See also Debien, Gabriel, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Francoises, XVIIe-XVIIIe Siècles (Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe and Fort de France, Martinique, 1974), 249–60, 268Google Scholar; Peytraud, L'Esclavage aux Antilles Francoises, 190–94; Gautier, Arlette, Les Soeurs de Solitude: La Condition Feminine dans I'Esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe Siècle (Paris, 1985), 138–42Google Scholar; Vaissière, Pierre de, Saint-Domingue: La Société et la Vie Creoles sous I'Ancien Regime, 1629–1789 (Paris, 1909), 205–12.Google Scholar

29. On the plantation of the Jesuits, for example, which was centrally located in New Orleans so that slaves would have exercised some degree of choice of spouses if they could have, all women on the plantation were married to men of the plantation, so they must have been required to do so; see Archives des Colonies, C13A, c. 43, fols. 331–52.

30. The corresponding article in the code of 1685 is number 24.

31. For representative examples, see Lange v. Geula, January 4 and 10, 1737, Louisiana Historical Collection. This is a particularly good case because the attorney general specifically appeals to the Code Noir in demanding that a recidivist maroon receive exemplary punishment. Even though the slave testifies that he was beaten much and fed little, the court rules that he be mutilated and sternly warned, whereas no injunction is leveled at the master. In every case in which the court interfered in the master-slave relation, it was to protect the property rights of the master or another white person, not to protect the slave. For a similar conclusion based on evidence from the French Antilles, see Peytraud, L'Esclavage aux Antilles Francoises, 239.

32. Martin, Histoire de I'Esclavage, 29.

33. The corresponding article in the code of 1685 is number 30, which states that the testimony of a slave is to serve only as a mémoire for judges. In a clarification of 1686, the crown changed the rule to read that slaves could be witnesses, except for or against their masters; see Petit, Traité sur le Gouvernement des Esclaves 1:31–32. The practice in both the Antilles and Louisiana was that when no white witnesses were available judges accepted the testimony of slaves in non-capital cases. The issue almost never arose in Louisiana.

34. For an exceptionally rare example of an overseer torturing a slave, see Merveilleux v. Gaullas, June 18, 1727, Louisiana Historical Collection. Brasseaux presents this case as an instance of enforcement of the Code Noir in “The Administration of Slave Regulations in French Louisiana,” 149–50, but the judges sought merely to protect the interests of the slaveowner from harm and did not punish Gaullas for inhumanity to the slave. For examples of judicial mutilation, see State v. Pierre and Jean, July 31, 1764, sentence of August 31, Louisiana Historical Collection; for torture, see Lebreton v. Temba, June 1, 1771, trans. Porteous, Laura, Louisiana Historical Quarterly 8 (1925): 5–22Google Scholar, sentence of June 9.

35. Bills of sale for children seldom appear in the record. For a case of a slave who protested separation from her child by sale, see the Petition of Joseph Maison, December 6, 1765, Louisiana Historical Collection; see the Declaration by Charles-Marie Dela-lande, December 16, 1765, Louisiana Historical Collection, that he has obtained permission from his female slave to exchange her son for a little boy belonging to another master; and see the unique case of a Declaration by Joseph LePage, December 11, 1769, Louisiana Historical Collection, that he is freeing a prepubescent boy because he separated him from his mother by purchase. In all three cases the master took the unusual step of citing the Code Noir as the reason for his action.

36. Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude, 142–45.

37. On marriage in the English colonies, see Gutman, Herbert G., The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1977), 347–51Google Scholar; Kulikoff, Allan, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 352–80Google Scholar; and 2d White, Deborah Gray, Ar'n't IA Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1987), 97–110, 142–60.Google Scholar

38. For the travails of a literate free black immigrant from France, see Raphael Bernard v. Cadot, May 9, 1724, Louisiana Historical Collection; and Bernard v. Dumanoir, July 26 and September 20, 1724, Louisiana Historical Collection.

39. State v. Jeannette [Connard?], April 8, 1747, Louisiana Historical Collection; the indictment included a vague charge of theft. For a unique and neglected comparative legal study of free blacks, see Lebeau, Auguste, De la Condition des Gens de Couleur Libres sous I'Ancien Régime d'après des Documents des Archives Coloniales (Paris, 1903).Google Scholar

40. Berlin, Ira, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 110.Google Scholar

41. A. J. T. Bonnemain in 1792, cited in Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, 207. For discussions of physical treatment of slaves in other French colonies, see Girod-Chantrans, Voyage, 130–36; Feytraud, L'Esclavage aux Antilles Francoises, 213–88; Vaissière, Saint-Domingue, 165–205; Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Francoises, 75–248; Gisler, Antoine, L'Esclavage aux Antilles Francoises, XVIIe-XIXe Siècle (Paris, 1981), 77–127Google Scholar; Daney, Sidney, Histoire de la Martinique depuis la Colonisation jusqu'en 1815, 3 vols. (Fort-Royal, Mart., 1963 [1846]), 3:90–93.Google Scholar

42. For a different view, see Brasseaux, “The Administration of Slave Regulations in French Louisiana,” 153.

43. Just before the promulgation of the Code Noir of 1685, a census of the principal French colonies in the islands indicated that mulattoes numbered only 245, or less than one percent of the population of 12,652 whites and 19,696 black slaves, in spite of the fact that white males outnumbered white females by nearly two to one; see census of April 12, 1683, Archives des Colonies, C8B, c. 17, no. 9; see also Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude, 72–73.

44. Peytraud, L'Esclavage aux Antilles Francoises, 196–208; Debien, Gabriel, “Les Affiranchissements aux Antilles Françaises aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 24 (1967): 1177–81Google Scholar; Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude, 151–81.

45. Watson's assertion that Article 9 of the old code rested unchanged in the code of 1724 is incorrect; see Slave Laws in the Americas, 88. The exceptional clause of 1685 permitting a “man” to marry a slave concubine if he was not married to someone else during his concubinage with her is changed to specify that only “the black man, manumittee or free[born]” [emphasis added], is permitted to marry his slave concubine. The code of 1685 (Article 9) set a fine of two thousand pounds of sugar for any free man who fathered a child by concubinage with a slave and the same for the master who permitted it to happen. The fines were payable in money (three hundred livres) in Louisiana because the crown did not want that colony to grow sugar cane. The same article in the code of 1685 provided for the seizure of the master's slave and children if he lived in concubinage with her, but allowed them to escape this penalty if he was unwed and married the slave, which, according to the code of 1724, was permissible only for a free black living in concubinage with his own slave. In practice, the marriage of white men and black women in the French Antilles was rare, regarded as socially acceptable only in the unusual case where a free black woman became rich and wed a poor white man; see Father Panier to Secretary of State Maurepas, September 25, 1741, Archives des Colonies, C14, c. 18, fols. 187–87v. It must be stressed that this was the local rule of thumb in the French Antilles and all available evidence suggests that this rule did not prevail in New Orleans, where social prejudice was effective in preventing racial intermarriage.

46. For other French colonies see Girod-Chantrans, Voyage, 180–86; Lebeau, De la Condition des Gens de Couleur Libres, 90–95; Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique, et Historique de la Partie Française de I'Isle Saint-Domingue, 3 vols., ed. Blanche Maurel and Étienne Taillemite (Paris, 1958 [1797]), 1:83–85, 103–11; Peytraud, L'Esclavage aux Antilles Françaises, 406–20; Vaissiére, Saint-Domingue, 63–65, 75–77; Hayot, E., “Les Gens de Couleur Libres du Fort-Royal, 1679–1823,” Revue Francaise d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer 56 (1969): 77–81Google Scholar; Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude, 157, Geggus, David P., Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford, 1982), 19–22.Google Scholar

47. Kinnaird, Lawrence, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794 (Washington, D.C., 1946), pt. 1, p. 196.Google Scholar The census of 1769, sometimes cited by scholars, is worthless because it excludes the Tchoupitoulas neighborhood of New Orleans parish, the largest single concentration of blacks in the colony. Of 157 free people of color in New Orleans in 1771, 90 were of mixed race, meaning the children of either interracial liaisons or liaisons between people of mixed race. Given the fact that the admixture of any white “blood” at all served to define a “black” person as a mulatto, the demographic logic is inescapable that a mixed-race population would be soon dominated by the offspring of liaisons in which both parents were of mixed race. Moreover, the slave population of 1771 included 280 additional people of mixed race, further discrediting the notion of a strong link between miscegenation and manumission. The argument that a significant number of mixed-blood people were passing into the “white race” before 1769, thereby artificially masking the extent of miscegenation, is not convincing; see Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1992), 239.Google Scholar The large permanent garrison in Louisiana, which included mostly unmarried soldiers, may have been the most significant factor in the procreation of those mixed-race children with white fathers.

48. For a different view, see Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 239–42; Foner, Laura, “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies,” Journal of Social History 3 (1970): 410–11, 414CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 108–10. As Debien shows, concubinage became an important factor in the manumission of slaves in the French West Indies only at the end of the eighteenth century; see “Les Affranchissements aux Antilles Françaises,” 1185–86.

49. Slave and Citizen, 55–56, 74–79; Baade, “The Law of Slavery in Spanish Luisiana,” 50, 53. For a rejoinder to Tannenbaum on this point, see Norman A. Meiklejohn, “The Implementation of Slave Legislation in Eighteenth-Century New Grenada,” in Toplin, Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, 185–86.

50. Watson, Slave Law in the Americas, 89; Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 29–31, 535–40.Google Scholar

51. For a good short discussion, see Cobb, Thomas R. R., An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1858), 1:235–39.Google Scholar Frederick Bowser shows that although slaves in Spanish colonies were permitted to possess property with the objective of purchasing freedom, they had no absolute right to peculium. Bowser, , The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford, 1974), 278–82.Google Scholar

52. Will of Francois Desherbois, July 13, 1727, Louisiana Historical Quarterly 4 (1921): 222.

53. Will of Calixte Descairac, September 7, 1738, Louisiana Historical Collection.

54. Will of Louise Pellerin, August 8, 1739, Louisiana Historical Collection.

55. Lebeau, De la Condition des Gens de Couleur Libres, 114–20.

56. The corresponding clause of the code of 1685 (Article 55) also differs from Article 50 of 1724 in that the former sets at twenty years the age at which a slaveowner is empowered to free a slave, the latter at twenty-five years. Once again, an important object of the article was to discourage both miscegenation and augmentation of the number of free blacks by such mixture.

57. At this and several other points in this article the analysis is at odds with that of Everett, Donald E., “Free Persons of Color in Colonial Louisiana,” Louisiana History 7 (1966): 21–50Google Scholar, in which the author presents French slave law in a much more favorable light.

58. For the most striking case, in which a unique slave who escaped overland from South Carolina to New Orleans was declared to be free and permitted to purchase a slave to be his wife, on the payment of installments of tobacco, see Contract of Jonathas Darby and John Mingo, November 28, 1727, Louisiana Historical Collection; Contract of Chavannes and Mingo, October 21, 1729, Louisiana Historical Collection; and Mingo v. Darby, November 21 and 25, 1730, Louisiana Historical Collection.

59. Will of Jacques Coustilhas, August 26, 1738, Louisiana Historical Collection.

60. This estimate is based on counting all emancipations individually as found in various record groups, and this base reproductive population easily accounts for all free blacks in the community at the end of the French period.

61. Watson's assertion that Article 51 “grants freedom to slaves whose masters by will appoint them guardians to their children” is debatable; see Slave Law in the Americas, 87. The actual language is that such slaves shall be “held and reputed as freedmen,” which is ambiguous, and, in any case, slaveholders were little inclined to entrust such matters to slaves. The code of 1724 differs from that of 1685 in several other minor particulars. In the 1724 code, Article 14 raises fines (set in Article 17 of the old code) on masters who permit recreational gatherings of slaves. Article 15 raises the fine (as set by Article 19 of the old code) on people who purchase goods from slaves who do not have passes. Article 33 provides that ordinary local judges can sentence slaves to corporal punishment for minor offenses without possibility of appeal to the Superior Council, by contrast with Article 32 of the code of 1685, which permits appeal in any case. Since the Superior Council was the only court in New Orleans, this provision was probably without any effect, although the situation in outlying posts, where a few slaves lived under the immediate jurisdiction of local commandants, is unknown. Article 34 in the new code converts to money the sugar fines set in Article 39 of the old code for whites (ten pounds per day) and free blacks (thirty pounds per day) who harbored slave runaways; it also stipulates that free blacks who cannot pay the fine will be sold into slavery by the state. Article 35 is a new clause that authorizes colonists to have runaway slaves pursued by anyone they deputize.

62. Regulations of Police for the Province of Louisiana, February 18, 1751, Archives des Colonies, C13A, c. 35, fols. 39–52v; Gayarré provides a partial and frequently unreliable paraphrase of the code in English in his History of Louisiana 2:361–67.

63. This population figure is based on the Census by Governors Ulloa and Aubry, May, 1766, Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Santo Domingo, leg. 2S8S, fols. l–26v.

64. Moore, John P., Revolt in Louisiana: The Spanish Occupation, 1766–1770 (Baton Rouge, La., 1976)Google Scholar; Texada, David K., Alejandro O'Reilly and the New Orleans Rebels (Lafayette, La., 1970).Google Scholar

65. Ordinance of August 27, 1769, Archives des Colonies, C13A, c. 49, fol. 69, which was published as a broadside. It was the first decree by O'Reilly after he finished securing an oath of fidelity from the inhabitants; see Proclamations of August 21, 23, and 27, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Manuscritos, leg. 19246, “Luisiana.”

66. For the best introductions to the Recopilacion de Leyes de Los Reynos de Las Indias, see Meiklejohn, “The Implementation of Slave Legislation in Eighteenth-Century New Grenada,” in Toplin, Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, 176–203; and Mellafe, Rolando, Negro Slavery in Latin America, trans. Judge, J. W. S. (Berkeley, 1975), 100–106.Google Scholar See also Rice, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery, 66–67, where he notes that research into the application of these laws is practically nonexistent. See also Dart, Henry P., Courts and Law in Colonial Louisiana (New Orleans, 1921)Google Scholar, especially pp. 35ff; idem, “The Place of the Civil Law in Louisiana,” Tulane Law Review 4 (1929–1930): 163–77; Gayarré, History of Louisiana 3:8–19. On the history of the publication and dissemination of the Recopilacion between 1680 and 1791, see Manzano, Juan Manzano, Historia de las Recopilaciones de Indias, 2 vols., 3d ed. (Madrid, 1991), 2:357–418.Google Scholar For O'Reilly's code, see Torres-Ramirez, Bibiano, Alejandro O'Reilly en las Indias (Seville, 1969), 203–25.Google Scholar

67. See, for example, Baade, “The Law of Slavery in Spanish Luisiana,” 53.

68. Ingersoll, “Free Blacks in a Slave Society” 183–84; see also Hanger, Kimberly S., “Avenues to Freedom Open to New Orleans' Black Population, 1769–1779” Louisiana History 31 (1990): 237–64.Google Scholar Publication of the policy would have been an open and dangerous invitation to all slaves to seek emancipation.

69. These generalizations are based on a reading of all wills in the New Orleans Notarial Archive for the Spanish period.

70. Torres-Ramirez, Alejandro O'Reilly en las Indias, 18–88.

71. Some historians have given the impression that judicially guaranteed coartación was always characteristic of Spanish-American slave laws, and this has simply never been demonstrated. Most of what has been written on this subject is based on Aimes, Hubert H. S., “Coartacion: A Spanish Institution for the Advancement of Slaves into Freedmen,” Yale Review 17 (1909): 412–31.Google Scholar Aimes refers vaguely to ancient customary law in the colonies, but a careful reading of his citations reveals that he does not provide evidence for the operation of the system before the 1760s; provides evidence that at that time metropolitan authority intervened to systematize coartacion but he is unable to cite specific laws concerning the rights of slaves; and acknowledges that he can find no evidence that coartacion existed in Spanish colonies other than Cuba before this time. Ibid., 412. We suffer painfully from the lack of a sophisticated analysis of manumission in early Cuba. For royal directives suggesting that in 1768 guaranteed coartacion was a new policy in Cuba, see Konetzke, Richard, Collección de Documentos para la Historia de la Formatión Social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1962), 3:337–40, 360–61.Google Scholar See Rout, Leslie B., The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day (New York, 1976), 87–88.Google Scholar Klein asserts that the right of freedom purchase was “fully guaranteed by the crown”; see Slavery in the Americas, 98–99. Both Klein and Tannenbaum assert that the clergy encouraged the manumission of slaves but offer no direct evidence; see ibid., and Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, 62, 99.

72. See, for example, Breen, T. H. and Innes, Stephen, “Myne One Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York, 1980), 72–79Google Scholar; Handler, Jerome S. and Sio, Arnold A., “Barbados,” in Neither Slave Nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, ed. Cohen, David W. and Greene, Jack P. (Baltimore, 1972), 225–26.Google Scholar

73. Petition of Diana, January 24, 1787, Louisiana Historical Collection.

74. Slaves and free blacks constituted 23.7 and 19.9 percent, respectively, of the population of Cuba in 1791; see Marianne Masferrer and Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “The Gradual Integration of the Black in Cuba: Under the Colony, the Republic, and the Revolution,” in Toplin, Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, 356.

75. Torres-Ramirez, Alejandro O'Reilly en las Indias, 22–23.

76. Petition of Catherine, June 25, 1773, Louisiana Historical Collection.

77. Petition of Marie-Louise Saly, January 23, 1781, Louisiana Historical Collection.

78. Petition of Isidore, March 15, 1788, Louisiana Historical Collection.

79. Particularly concise on anti-black attitudes and the insecure position of free blacks in Spanish America are Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 110, 278–82, 301–25; and Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, 87–93.

80. The estimate is based on the only thorough census taken during the Spanish period, according to which 9,513 slaves lived in greater New Orleans in 1785, just before the period when the African slave trade began to boom. See Summary of the Census of 1785, Parsons Collection, Library of the University of Texas at Austin. Since this is the only reliable demographic figure for slaves available at this time, estimating the whole slave population between 1769 and 1807 with any degree of precision is impossible, but thirty to forty thousand is close enough for the present purpose. This is guided by one crude statistic derived from the mortality records of blacks in the year 1810, as recorded in Funeral Registers 4 and 5 for Free Persons of Color and Slaves, St. Louis Cathedral Archives, New Orleans. Of 577 deaths, 253 (44 percent) were those of children under the age of five years. Infants and small children must be included in such a figure because they comprised an important minority of freedom purchases, and given this high rate, a total slave population of forty thousand for the whole period seems very conservative. If it was higher, the emancipation rate was proportionately lower.

81. Torres-Ramirez, Alejandro O'Reilly en las Indias, 138–41, 145–46. The policy was new only in its formality, for French administrators had employed armed free blacks in a military capacity in the past; see McConnell, Roland C., Negro Troops of Antebellum Louisiana: A History of the Battalion of Free Men of Color (Baton Rouge, 1968), 5–32.Google Scholar

82. Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, 49–52, 73.

83. For a rare exception, see Manuel de Lanzos v. Pierre Santilly, December 11, 1779, Louisiana Historical Collection.

84. Code Noir ou Loi Municipale Servant de Reglement pour le Gouvernement…. (New Orleans, 1778); Debates of February 19, 26, and March 1, 1779, Copia Fiel de las Actas Originales del Cabildo, 1769–1803, 4 vols., transcriptions by the Works Progress Administration deposited in New Orleans Public Library, 1:266–69. The king's authorization is noted in the preamble to the code. The Spanish transcriptions of the cabildo records have two systems of pagination, numbers in the top left corner of the page that refer to the original ledgers, and, in the right corner, page numbers for the transcription books. Since New Orleans Public Library forbids access to the originals, citations here refer to the pages of the transcription books.

85. Torres-Ramirez, Alejandro O'Reilly en las Indias, 187–202. The New Orleans cabildo was even less powerful than those of older Spanish-American colonies; see Haring, C. H., The Spanish Empire in America (New York, 1947), 147–65.Google Scholar

86. The articles are numbered from 1 to 73 but there is no Article 33.

87. Code Noir ou Loi Municipale, 2.

88. Charles-Joseph Loppinot v. Jean Villeneuve, April 15, 1774, Louisiana Historical Collection.

89. Ibid.; Gayarré, History of Louisiana 2:219–22. This couple is probably the one recorded in the Marriage Contract of Jean Paillet and Catherine Villeray, November 16, 1769, Louisiana Historical Collection. Catherine was a quadroon. It is possible that a tiny handful of mulattoes who were married in New Orleans had black mothers and white fathers who were legitimately married, although their matrimony was not recorded in New Orleans. See, for example, the marriage of Charrayse and Barco, January 20, 1777, First Book of Marriages of Negroes and Mulattoes of the Parish of Saint Louis in this City of New Orleans, Saint Louis Cathedral Archives, fol. lv. For an interesting case study of a non-sanctioned marriage between a white man and black slave in western Louisiana, see Mills, Gary B., The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge, La., 1977), 12–23.Google Scholar

90. These fines are equivalent to those in the code of 1724.

91. Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, 140–45, 156–59. Local studies bear out Rout's conclusion that marriages between blacks and whites were unusual because of white prejudice. See Love, Edgar F., “Marriage Patterns of Persons of African Descent in a Colonial Mexico City Parish,” Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (1971): 79–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCaa, Robert, “Modeling Social Interaction: Marital Miscegenation in Colonial Spanish America,” Historical Methods 15 (1982): 45–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Investigations of the limpieza de sangre of prospective white spouses are found scattered throughout the Louisiana archives in this period, showing the prejudice against anyone whose “blood” was tainted by ancestry from “Moors, Jews, Mulattoes, or Indians.” See the case of Marguerite Wiltz, February 7, 1776, Louisiana Historical Collection. About 200 of the 1,330 freedom purchases recorded between 1769 and 1810 were paid for by white men who were probably related to the manumitttee by parental or affectionate ties; see Ingersoll, “Free Blacks in a Slave Society,” 188. The data concerning gratuitous emancipations is more ambiguous, but a variety of indications suggest that they were even less likely to be inspired by biological or affectionate ties between master and slave. Spanish judges offered no comfort to white paramours who tried to renege on favors to freed blacks after the affair was ended and might hold even a respectable planter up to public ridicule; see Madeleine Canelle v. Louis Beaurepos, January 20, 1777, filed January 18, Louisiana Historical Collection.

92. Code Noir ou Loi Municipale, 3.

93. Ibid., 4.

94. Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, 49; Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 62. Only two rare appeals can be found in New Orleans, both dating from the early tenure of a Spanish governor who had acquired an unwarranted reputation for favoring the supposed rights of slaves. See Petition of Charlotte, February 27, 1793, Louisiana Historical Collection; and Petition of Philippe, June 7, 1793, Louisiana Historical Collection.

95. The essential passage in the cabildo records is found in the Deliberations of June 11, 1784, Actas Originates del Cabildo, 2:217–19. For the most thorough treatments of the story of the maroon camp, see Din, Gilbert C., “Cimarrones and the San Malo Band in Spanish Louisiana,” Louisiana History 21 (1980): 237–62Google Scholar; and Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 202–36. I do not agree with Hall's view that true maroon camps were endemic in Louisiana's history or that by the early 1780s “the maroons of Louisiana had asserted their control over a strategically vital part of Louisiana: Bas du Fleuve, the area between the mouth of the Mississippi River and New Orleans.” Ibid., 205. Din gives the number of slaves executed as eight. Din, “Cimarrones and the San Malo Band,” 257–58. On Governor Esteban Miró's absence from New Orleans during the whole incident and his concern about the legality of the executions, see ibid., 258–61.

96. Baade, “The Law of Slavery in Spanish Luisiana,” 65–66; Din, “Cimarrones and the San Malo Band,” 243–44, 255.

97. Volume 2:365–70, or Book VII, Title 5, for the whole array of laws on maroons. The other notable distinction of the Loi Municipale is the provision requiring character references of slaves seeking to purchase themselves, a system that was at least implicitly in effect, given the fact that the notaries' emancipation papers had to be witnessed and curious patterns are faintly detectable in the personnel supplying these signatures; and, second, given that, as discussed earlier, slaves who could not prove their good character were denied the privilege of freedom purchase in the courts of the governor or alcaldes.

98. Audiencia de Santo Domingo, leg. 2588, fols. 1189–97v, microfilm copy in The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans; see also Konetzke, Collection de Documentos para la Historia de la Formatión Social de Hispanoamérica 3:643–52. On the background, including the influence of the French Code Noir, and the trial version of the code written for Santo Domingo in 1784, see Barceló, Javier Malagón, Codigo Negro Caroline, 1784 (Santo Domingo, Dom. Rep., 1974)Google Scholar; and Sala-Molins, Louis, L'Afrique aux Amériques: Le Code Noir espagnol (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar, which includes a French translation of the code of 1784. See also König, Hans-Joachim, “The Código Negrero of 1789: Its Background and its Reverberations,” in Slavery in the Americas, ed. Binder, Wolfgang (Wurzburg, 1993), 141–50.Google Scholar

99. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 79.

100. Ibid.

101. It is true that the 1780s were a period of reform in the slave laws of many regions of the Atlantic world, but emphasis on supposed humanitarianism obscures the profound commitment to perpetuate slavery; see Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Francoises, 471–95; Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 346–48, 365–72Google Scholar; Craton, Michael, Walvin, James, Wright, David, eds., Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Black Slaves and the British Empire, A Thematic Documentary (London, 1976), 181, 186–90.Google Scholar

102. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 78–79; Ortiz, Fernando, Los Negros Esclavos (1916; reprint Havana, 1975), 329–30Google Scholar; Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, 84; and Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 203–5. The first act in a series that would establish free trade in African slaves was declared on February 28, 1789, and the Codigo Negro followed on May 31.

103. Ortiz, Los Negros Esclavos, 329–35, 408–15.

104. Cabildo Minutes, February 26, 1790, Actas Originates del Cabildo, 3, no. 2:90–91.

105. Appeal by the Cabildo, July 23, 1790, Biblioteca Nacional, leg. 19248, “Luisiana,” fols. 167–74v; Endorsement by the Governor, July 23, 1790, Audiencia de Santo Domingo, leg. 2554, fols. U6–116v.

106. Mellafe, Negro Slavery in Latin America, 106–11; Knight, Franklin W., Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison, 1970), 11, 125–26Google Scholar; Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 84–85.

107. “Having received the most exact orders from the Court,” July 11, 1792, Archivo General de Indias, Papeles Procedentes de Cuba, Microfilm copy in The Historic New Orleans Collection, leg. 18, fols. 892–93v. This directive comprised a mere six articles. See also McGowan, James T., “Creation of a Slave Society: Louisiana Plantations in the Eighteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1976), 296–311Google Scholar, for a different view.

108. The importance of local conditions elsewhere is stressed or implied in discussions by Watson, Slave Law in the Americas, 57–58; Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies, 89–107; and Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, 81–87.

109. Cabildo Minutes, April 25, 1795 and passim, Actas Originates del Cabildo, 4, no. 1:2–42; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 343–74; Ocariz, Juan Jose Andreu, Movimientos Rebeldes de los Esclavos Negros durante el Domino Espafiol en Luisiana (Zaragoza, Spain, 1977), 117–38.Google Scholar

110. Regulation of the general police, June 1, 1795, Biblioteca Nacional, leg. 19509, “Colección de varios documentos para la historia de la Florida y tierras adyacentes, II,” 1–17; for a reliable English translation, see “‘A Decree for Louisiana,’ June 1, 1795,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 30 (1937): 590–605, ed. and trans., James A. Padgett; see also Andreu Ocariz, Movimientos Rebeldes, 179–220. For Carondelet's further instructions for “neighborhood commissioners” of January 1, 1796, see Papeles Proce-dentes de Cuba, leg. 212b, fols. 129–33v.

111. Regulation of the general police, 1.

112. Carondelet to Eugenio de Llaguno y Amirola, May 31, 1796, Biblioteca Nacional, leg. 19508, “Coleccion de varios documentos para la historia de la Florida y tierras adyacentes, I,” fols. 414–19v.

113. Ibid. The word “police” is used here in the same general sense in which it was used at the time. Only in the nineteenth century did New Orleans begin trying to establish a regular white gendarmerie.

114. Ibid., 601.

115. State v. Claude Tremé, December 21, 1787, Louisiana Historical Collection; State v. Vincent Lesassier, September 27, 1793, Louisiana Historical Collection; State v. Guy Dreux, November 2, 1796, Louisiana Historical Collection. On Dreux's reputation, see Joseph-Xavier Pontalba to Jeanne-Louise Pontalba, November 4, 1796, Pontalba Family Papers, Tulane University Special Collections.

116. Fiehrer, Thomas M., “The African Presence in Colonial Louisiana: An Essay on the Continuity of Caribbean Society,” in Louisiana's Black Heritage, ed. McDonald, Robert R. et al. (New Orleans, 1979), 18–19, 29–30.Google Scholar For descriptions of generally harsh treatment of slaves by Louisiana slaveowners, see Latrobe, Benjamin H., Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary and Letters, 1818–1820, ed., Wilson, Samuel Jr, (New York, 1951), 53–58Google Scholar; and Laussat, Pierre-Clement de, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Pastwa, Sister Agnes-Josephine, ed. Robert D. Bush (Baton Rouge, La., 1978), 54–55.Google Scholar

117. The debate on the slave trade issue spanned the years between 1795 and 1800; it hinged on the problem of public order and included charges by Spanish officials that disorder was provoked by the brutality of slaveowners; see Cabildo Minutes, various dates, Actas Originales del Cabildo, 4, no. 1:40–41, 95–98, 128, 135–38; 4, no. 3:206–22; and 4, no. 4:13–28. In 1811, the largest slave rebellion in the history of North America took place not far upriver from New Orleans, and in 1812 a slave plot was broken in New Orleans itself. See Dormon, James H., “The Persistent Specter Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana,” Louisiana History 18 (1977): 389–404;Google Scholar and Aptheker, Herbert, American Negro Slave Revolts, 2d ed. (1943, reprint New York, 1969), 249–51, 254–55.Google Scholar

118. Regulation of June 15, 1795, Papeles Procedentes de Cuba, leg. 618, fols. 1414–18; Decree of September 15, 1795, leg. 22, fol. 1179.

119. Casa Calvo to the Cabildo, October 24, 1800, Actas Originates del Cabildo, 4, no. 4:13–22.

120. Records of the Sates of the United States of America, Louisiana, B.l, Reel 1, 1678–1810, ed. Jenkins, William S. (Washington, D.C., 1949)Google Scholar, unit 5; and Decree, December 17, 1803, The Laussat Papers, The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, no. 332, o.s. On the pressure, see Laussat, Memoirs of My Life, 87.

121. Regulation of Louisiana Government [“Projet de Réglement pour le Gouvernement et l'administration… de la Louisiane”], n. d., signed by Mayor P[ierre] Derbigny, The Laussat Papers, no. 330, o.s. This is a group of twenty-eight articles.

122. Article 1, Act of March 9, 1807, Acts Passed at the Second Session of the First Legislature of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans, 1807), 82.

123. For a different conclusion, see Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 129. Berlin states that the principal marks of free blacks' “relatively high status” were that they could testify against whites and travel freely in Louisiana without freedom papers. In fact, the same rule of thumb that was followed during the Spanish period about testimony by blacks was continued: It was accepted only in unusual circumstances. After reading all published reports of the territorial Superior Court and the State Supreme Court and a representative sample of the original records of cases appealed to these courts up to 1823, I found that free blacks never or virtually never testified against whites, except in freedom suits by blacks or suits for recovery in which the legal emancipation of a slave was in doubt, which were allowed in all states. The whole question of free blacks' rights to initiate or participate in suits (in any state) remains largely unexplored. Berlin errs on the subject of freedom papers; by Article 21 of the Black Code of 1806, free blacks were strictly required to carry these documents.

124. Acts Passed at the First Session of the First Legislature of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans, 1806), “Black Code”: 150–90; and “Criminal Code for Slaves”: 190–212.

125. For the argument that Americans made important changes, see Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 122–23. Rather than an agent of change, as pictured by Berlin, Governor William C. C. Claiborne tried to restrain the planters from launching a full-scale campaign against free blacks, for example.

126. On debates concerning the transformation of Louisiana law after 1803, debates in which slave law is largely ignored, see A N. Yiannopoulos, “The Early Sources of Louisiana Law: Critical Appraisal of a Controversy,” in Haas and McDonald, Louisiana's Legal Heritage, 87–106. On the attempt to introduce the common law into Louisiana after 1803, see Dargo, George, Jefferson's Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge, Ma., 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the effect of the common law on Louisiana slaves, see Schafer, “The Long Arm of the Law.”

127. On this question, see Goodell, William, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice (1853; repr. New York, 1968), 90Google Scholar, 130–31, 161–63, 241–44, 293–94, 300–301, 322, 343–44; Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery 1:226–34, 240–59, 278–317. For representative cases and interesting commentary, see Finkelman, Paul, The Law of Freedom and Bondage: A Casebook (New York, 1986).Google Scholar For a useful debate on the essential character of slavery as revealed in American slave law and judicial practice, which has the coincidental effect of stressing its unformity in space and time, see Tushnet, Mark V., The American Law of Slavery, 1810–1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton, 1981)Google Scholar; and Fede, Andrew, “Toward a Solution of the Slave Law Dilemma: A Critique of Tushnet's ‘The American Law of Slavery’” Law and History Review 2 (1984): 301–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar