Description: "Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate -- about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy" -- became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "good Samaritans." Using Minna's case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free"--
Brief description:
Hendrik Hartog is Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus at Princeton University and author of Public Property and Private Power.
Review Quotes:
"Hartog resists the impulse prevalent in the historiography of northern emancipation to keep moral score; he neither celebrates nor castigates gradual abolitionism. Rather, Hartog follows the smoke of litigation to find fires that shed light on fraught human experiences. Subsequent historians of northern slavery's terminal era will learn from his thoughtful approach to a legal regime designed paradoxically to dismantle and to maintain the status quo."--Journal of the Civil War Era