Nothing More than Freedom
The Failure of Abolition in American Law

Reveals that slavery has remained embedded in private law well after its ostensible demise.

Giuliana Perrone (Author)

9781009219174, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 May 2025

334 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.543 kg

'Those interested in African Americans' unending fight for liberation, or how systematic racism undermined their progress in the last decades of the nineteenth century, will find Perrone's discoveries fascinating … Perrone has provided further insight into the fraught struggle for freedom, a struggle that lasted long after slavery's demise.' Jonathan Lande, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Nothing More than Freedom explores the long and complex legal history of Black freedom in the United States. From the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 until the end of Reconstruction in 1877, supreme courts in former slave states decided approximately 700 lawsuits associated with the struggle for Black freedom and equal citizenship. This litigation – the majority through private law – triggered questions about American liberty and reassessed the nation's legal and political order following the Civil War. Judicial decisions set the terms of debates about racial identity, civil rights, and national belonging, and established that slavery, as a legal institution and social practice, remained actionable in American law well after its ostensible demise. The verdicts determined how unresolved facets of slavery would undercut ongoing efforts for abolition and the realization of equality. Insightful and compelling, this work makes an important intervention in the history of post-Civil War law.

Introduction: an abolitionist vision
1. The contract controversy
2. 'Wreck and ruin'
3. 'By force it was destroyed'
4. Confederate reckonings
5. Life after the death of slavery
6. 'Back into the days of slavery'
7. 'The grave question'
8. Final failure
Epilogue: an abolitionist revision.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]