Slavery and the Founders

Dilemmas of Jefferson and His Contemporaries
1. Auflage 1995
ISBN: 978-1-56324-590-9
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 226 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 507 g

This text studies the attitudes of the founding "fathers" toward slavery. Specifically, it examines the views of Thomas Jefferson reflected in his life and writings and those of other founders as expressed in the Northwest Ordinance, the Constitutional Convention and the Constitution itself, and the fugitive slave legislation of the 1790s. The author contends: slavery fatally permeated the founding of the American republic; the original constitution was, as the abilitionists later maintained, "a covnenant with death"; and Jefferson's anti-slavery reputation is undeserved and most historians and biographers have prettified Jefferson's record on slavery.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Finkelman, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface 1. Making a Covenant with Death: Slavery and the Constitutional Convention 2. Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity 3. Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois 4. Implementing the Proslavery Constitution: The Adoption of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 5. Thomas Jefferson and Slavery “Treason Against the Hopes of the World” 6. Thomas Jefferson and Slavery II: Historians and Myth

Über Autor(innen)

Paul Finkelman is currently Visiting Professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and the incoming Charlton W. Tebeau Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Miami at Coral Gables.