A bold new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed ...fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. In the Matter of Nat Turner penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution.Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner's notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. Christopher Tomlins provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. Tomlins also undertakes a deeply critical examination of William Styron's 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots.A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, In the Matter of Nat Turner is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.
Freedom Bound is about the origins of modern America – a history of colonizing, work and civic identity from the beginnings of English presence on the mainland until the Civil War. It is a history of ...migrants and migrations, of colonizers and colonized, of households and servitude and slavery, and of the freedom all craved and some found. Above all it is a history of the law that framed the entire process. Freedom Bound tells how colonies were planted in occupied territories, how they were populated with migrants – free and unfree – to do the work of colonizing and how the newcomers secured possession. It tells of the new civic lives that seemed possible in new commonwealths and of the constraints that kept many from enjoying them. It follows the story long past the end of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War, when – just for a moment – it seemed that freedom might finally be unbound.
This essay appraises Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution (2022). The book proposes that an examination of American history since the founding of the republic ...discloses a polity that, at least incipiently and thereafter occasionally explicitly, promised its members lives of material well-being sufficient to their responsibilities as citizens of a republic. The authors argue that this promise, which they dub “democracy-of-opportunity,” was honed in battle down the years with champions of “oligarchy and exclusion” for mastery of the instrumentalities of “constitutional political economy.” They affirm the constitutive capacities of constitutionalism as a progressive fighting faith that can revive democracy-of-opportunity in the twenty-first century. This essay sympathizes with the authors’ broad objectives, but does not agree with their arguments. It argues that the lesson LPE scholars should take from this critical encounter is that the law of the current conjuncture cannot reconstruct that conjuncture’s economic foundations.
A bold new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South
In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed ...fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed.In the Matter of Nat Turner penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution.
Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner's notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. Christopher Tomlins provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. Tomlins also undertakes a deeply critical examination of William Styron's 1967 novel,The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots.
A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life,In the Matter of Nat Turner is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.
'Minor Jurisprudence' was an invention of the mid-1990s. For that reason alone, the song 'Damnation's Cellar', released by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet in 1993, offers an appropriate ...soundtrack for this introduction to our exploration of the concept. But as we shall see, minor jurisprudence renders sound more than merely accompaniment (Rajah 2017: 266-7), more than just an element of the 'context' that law inhabits. No: here law is sound and sound is law - they are together, a songline (Chatwin 1987; but cf Barr 2017: 232, citing Neidjie 1989: 18-19). Materiality is not context. Instead materality gushes out of many of the essays in this volume 'as law', law instantiated as sound, touch, appearance, imprint; in motion, in rhythm, in liveliness. Minor jurisprudence is 'grounded jurisprudence' in Kirsten Anker's apt description (2017: 193). Here also is a jurisprudence that is light to the major's 'dark side' (Davidson 2017: 100). But the minor itself can be dark - in its silences (Rajah 2017: 266), in masquerades of misunderstanding and deception (Painter 2017: 278-9), in mourning and death no less than life (Minkkinen 2017: 158). Looks can deceive, the material is just as wily as the ideal (Goodrich 2017: 44). Costello asks whether the minor (no less than the major) is tallow or tar? Tallow can be molded. Tar? Apparently nothing but a sticky mess. Is minor jurisprudence a mistake? Genevieve Painter asks.
"A fixed principle of honesty" Christopher Tomlins
California law review,
11/2023, Volume:
111, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Even in a century notable for oratory, Frederick Douglass's capacities as an orator were astonishing. He was a master of words, whether spoken or written. Because he was born into slavery, his ...capacities were doubly astonishing, for as Christopher Hager has noted, "No people were more estranged from the formal culture of literacy, or more driven to improvisation, than those enslaved in the South." But for this very reason, to recognize Douglass as a marvel also risks turning him into a freak. So instead, I want to think about Douglass as a human being encased in language and its limits, just as we all are, and to ask what that means.
This essay comments on the three substantive articles comprising the University of Toronto Law Journal's symposium on ferae naturae and the law of property. It argues that the articles collectively ...represent a reconsideration of the influential thesis developed by Robert Ellickson in Order without Law, that when members of any community resolve disputes arising in the course of some shared activity they are prone to do so in ways that avoid the costs that law imposes on the process of settlement because 'coordination to mutual advantage without supervision by the state' works better than order with it. Rather than confirming law's unimportance, this essay argues, the articles collectively demonstrate the importance of law. The essay recognizes, however, that some of the ways in which the importance of law is demonstrated are distinct from the measures of importance originally considered by Ellickson. Following their lead, the essay considers additional criteria by which we might assess the significance of the law of property in wild animals — not least whether that law has taken the animals themselves into consideration.
The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century
decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor ...law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters
.
Abstract
In this Coda to the symposium on my book
In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History
, I address the relationship in the book between law, history, and theory. Writing history ...informed by theory has always been important to me, for historical research is at least as much an engagement in interpretation as an exercise in description.
Freedom Bound: A Response to Readers Tomlins, Christopher
The William and Mary quarterly,
10/2011, Volume:
68, Issue:
4
Book Review, Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Tomlins responds to the criticisms and compliments of his book, Freedom Bound. One of his critique is Julia Adams. He says that as Adams notes, Freedom Bound has an extensive and ambitious agenda, ...but it is rooted in the material: dynamic "configurations of land and labor" on each side of the Atlantic and their interrelationship. Mobility induced by the colonizing impulse transferred population and reproduced plural regional practices; population underpinned otherwise conjectural claims to occupancy and sovereignty; the whole--beautifully summarized as "a moving equilibrium a quarter of a millennium long"--is a process encased in and guided by law.
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