Judith Kelleher Schafer.

Judith Kelleher Schafer. Slavery, the Civil Law, and the first Court of Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP 1994 389 pp $4550 cloth/$1695 paper.

This extremely important book focuses on the evolution of law and the operation of slavery in antebellum Louisiana in consequence of the study of law and the purports of Americanization. It is based with a unique and comprehensive carcass of data relating to slavery and the evolution of law in nineteenth-century Louisiana between the walls of cases heard by the State greatest Court. The great bulk of these unique records have been deposited at the Earl K lengthy Library of the University of strange Orleans under the able, meticulous, and enthusiastic care of their archivist, Mary E Windell. As the author states, "To my knowledge, no the same has ever [before] done a investigation of slave law in any state in the American toward the south using a body of original case records containing judicial decisions that span the entire antebellum period." These documents date between 1803 and 1862 when strange Orleans fell to Federal multitudes during the Civil War. further Schafer also discusses some post-Civil War cases involving the validity of obligations incurred over the purchase and mortgage of slaves. Going far beyond the usual studious mood of judicial decisions alone, the writer studied the manuscript materials accompanying these cases, which allow for a greatly enriched and intensifyed discussion of the issues involved as well as of the evolution of attitudes and legal interpretations.

The writer discusses the representativeness of these cases which, in succession the one hand, are broad in that the highest Court did not have the right of refusal and therefore had to hear all appealed cases. if it were not that the costs involved limited chiefly cases heard to wealthy appellants. There was a regional bias as well, since the Court met in fresh Orleans throughout the year and traveled to other parts of the state solely during September and October.

Louisiana law operates beneath code rather than common law, although athwart time principles of common law based heavily immediately after legal precedent and case law crept into the a whole Most of the Supreme Court justices of antebellum Louisiana were trained in common-law states, on the other hand Louisiana slave law continued to be influenced by the agency of formal codes inherited from the French and Spanish colonial periods.

It is not surprising, especially since this main division remained in press for likewise long, that Schafer relies heavily on somewhat dated publications about slave law from the French and Spanish periods. individual of these weaknesses involves lumping judicial torture of slaves in French and Spanish Louisiana together. In French Louisiana, the in the greatest degree brutal forms of torture of prisoners were highly common, but poor whites were also tortured, normally by way of a black slave executioner. Legal prohibition of slave testimony against whites was taken as fact, although blacks, slave and emancipated did in practice testify against whites in the two French and Spanish Louisiana. French law prohibited the separate sale of husband and wife or a slave child subject to the age of 14 from either mother or father. This prohibition was, in fact, normally practiced in French Louisiana, on the other hand not in the French West Indies or in Spanish Louisiana.

Comparing the Louisiana experience with that of other intricate South slave states, Schafer closes that Louisiana slave law was until 1850 milder in allowing for manumission. In antebellum Louisiana, self-purchase for manumission was allowed, if it be not that not forced. In other words, a master could allow a slave to be manumitted between the sides of self-purchase or purchase by others, if it be not that this was not an enforceable right, as it was beneath Spanish law. In antebellum Louisiana, a one held in slavery had the right to entreat only when claiming to be illegally enslaved. While the writer attributes Louisiana's somewhat better record in allowing for manumission to the heritage of Spanish law, this argument is too narrowly legalistic. The really open tradition from below of race relations in the state, the large and relatively prosperous exempt colored population and its ties to those Creole counted white, was no doubt an important factor as well. While the Black digest of 1806 restricted manumissions to slaves aged 30 or older an 1831 amendment allowed slaves in a less degree than 30 to be manumitted if they were natives of Louisiana. The fact that there were no manumissions by dint of will contested before 1836 indicates a able survival of the tradition of freeing concubines and children of at liberty men, including whites. Paul Lachance's novel study of wills probated in recently made known Orleans between 1804 and 1812 (Social Science History 182 [1994]) demonstrates that one-third of white men born before 1740 258 percent born between 1740 and 1759 and 19 percent born between 1760 and 1779 indicated in their wills that they were involved in consensual unions with women of color and passed forward property to their concubines and their natural children. All forms of manumission were outlawed in 1857

Schafer's informative chapters dealing with manumission would have been enhanced at a discussion of flexible definitions of race in Louisiana and large-scale passing of mixed-bloods into the "white" population (see for example, Virginia Dominguez's 1985 volume White by Definition). The writer's definition of Creole as meaning white and Creole of Color meaning non-white is a confusing, inaccurate, and ahistorical distinction which caters to surviving racist sentiments and delusions of racial "purity" in Louisiana.