New Histories of the Private Law of Slavery

The new scholarship on the private law of slavery, exemplified by the articles in this Symposium, differs from earlier scholarship in its focus on the law in lower courts, as in Ariela Gross's article, and on the law in action, as in Thomas Russell's. The prior generation of scholarship, including my own, focused almost exclusively on appellate decisions and commentary by pro and antislavery lawyers. The new scholarship resembles its predecessor, however, in using legal materials to explore aspects of the ideology of slavery. For example, Gross develops a highly nuanced account of the image of the good master from interrogatories and other legal events at the trial court level. In this Comment I want to raise some questions about the enterprise of using law to explore ideology.