Southern Slavery: Chapter Summary

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Morris, in Southern Slavery, attempts to create a synthesis of how slavery in the Southern United States reacted with the system of law present in the South during the years 1619-1860. The four sections of the book deal with different aspects of slavery and how it interacted with law in the South. The first section sees Morris examining what influenced slave law in the southern states at its base level. He focuses on how race factored into the laws, as well as what the slaves laws in each state were derived from. Morris argues that southern slave law came about as a mixture of common law, and harkening back to Roman and Judeo/Christian law.
The second section deals with slaves as property. The four chapters that Morris devotes to this topic detail how southern law evolved over time in its interpretation of slaves as property. Morris believes that slaves were designated as two different types of property in the …show more content…
Initially slave law evolved due to slaves being treated as property, and the need to establish the laws themselves using the already existing system(s) of law. This process took decades, even centuries and can be traced by looking at statutes adopted in individual states. A clear evolutionary trend can be shown in the states Morris examines, as states moved from treating slaves as simple property, to starting to treat slaves as human. Morris contends one of the biggest factors in the evolution of slave law in the south was the beginning of “liberal capitalism” during the Antebellum period, further impacting the laws treating slaves as property. Morris also believes that the idea of slaves as human accompanied the adopted of liberal capitalism during the same period, also impacting slave law. Morris goes a step further and suggests that if left alone, the system of slavery was being pushed closer to that of labor in the north, modifying or even removing slavery from the south altogether.
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