Inconsistency, Contradiction, and Complete Confusion: The Everyday Life of the Law of Slavery

Abstract

Forecasting earthquakes is a difficult business: locating fault lines that lie deep beneath the surface of the earth; estimating friction and force; predicting the effects of the cataclysm upon the world above. Though the job of historians is characterized by the same sorts of questions-isolating the grand threads of history that underlie their accounts; estimating the causal forces of evident tensions; relating deep structures to specific events-they seem at first to have a slightly easier task than do earthquake forecasters; after all, the events they describe have already happened. But look again, and the historian's job seems the harder one. For historians there is no simple chain of causation that can be used to explain every event, no certainty that an impulse comes from underground and that its effects will be evident on the surface, no agreed-upon account of what happened that points to a ready-made version of why it happened. The problem is human agency, and it makes the job of historians like predicting earthquakes at a time when people on the surface of the earth are dropping bombs on fault lines. In the history of the law of slavery this problem has taken a particular form: that of relating the underlying circumstances-economic and ideolog-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.