Slavery Law
Primary Legal Sources
Bill Schwesig
Bibliographer for Common Law
D’Angelo Law Library
Statutes
 Published as
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Slip laws/pamphlets
Session laws
Statutes at large
Codified laws
Statute Sources
 LexisNexis
Laws in force, with case annotations
 Hein Online
Federal and State Session Laws
Includes colonial and territorial laws
 LLMC Digital
Mainly session laws
 Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources
Compilations of laws, municipal ordinances,
constitutional conventions
Slavery Statute Compilations
 State slavery statutes UPA Academic Editions, c1989.
Microfiche with print guide.
 microfcXXKF4545.S5A3 1989 D'Angelo Law, Microforms
 Paul Finkelman (ed.), Statutes on slavery : the pamphlet
literature. Garland (1988) XXKF4545.S5A50 1988 ser.7
Regenstein Bookstacks, D'Angelo Bookstacks
Courts of Record
 Supreme Court
 Lower Appellate Courts
 Names vary: Court of Appeal, Court of Errors
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LexisNexis
LLMC Digital state reports, Federal Cases
D’Angelo Law Library Annex
Scan and Deliver
Legal Citations
 Volume + reporter + page + court* + year
 Sanders v. Ward, 25 Ga. 109 (1858)
[State’s name alone means highest appellate court.]
 Early US Supreme Court cases include citations to US
Reports and original nominative reports.
 Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393; 19 How. 393 (1857)
 The citations in very old sources are to nominate reports that
are now cited as volumes of Alabama Reports, Tennessee
Reports, etc. Suggestion: Search by Case Name on
LexisNexis
Finding Cases
 LexisNexis is useful
 Digests are not very useful
Legal issue may involve slavery per se
 Secondary Sources and collections
 Paul Finkelman, Slavery in the courtroom : an annotated
bibliography of American cases. Library of Congress (1985) /
by Paul Finkelman. XXKF4545.S5A1230 1985 D'Angelo
Bookstacks, Regenstein Bookstacks
 Jacob D. Wheeler, A practical treatise on the law of slavery.
(1837) Available as an ebook.
 Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926
Slavery Case Law Collections
 Slavery, race, and the American legal system, 17001872, edited by Paul Finkelman
Contents: I. Southern Slaves in Free State Courts; II. Fugitive
Slaves and American Courts; III. Abolitionists in Northern Courts; IV.
Statutes on Slavery; V. Free Blacks, Slaves and Slave-owners in
Civil and Criminal Courts; VI. The African Slave Trade and American
Courts; VII. Slave Rebels, Abolitionists and Southern Courts.
XXKF4545.S5A50 1988 D’Angelo Bookstacks, Regenstein
Bookstacks
Trial Courts
 Superior Courts
 County and Municipal Courts
 Law and Chancery
Modern Trial Records
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Complaint or indictment
Docket sheet
Motions
Orders
Final order or memorandum of opinion
Verbatim transcript
Many/all documents filed electronically
Closed cases transferred to records facility or archive
Historical Court Records
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Limited records
Dockets
Minutes
Case name indexes
 Located at State Archives
 Not all records survive
Identifying trial level cases
 Appellate cases
 Published trials
Making of Modern Law: Trials
Hein Online World Trial Library
 News accounts
 Court record indexes
State Archives finding aids
Ancestry Library Edition
FamilySearch.com
Digital Collections
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Library of Congress
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860
From Slavery to Freedom … 1822-1909
Slavery Resource Guide
 Yale Libraries
 Slavery and Abolition Portal
 Researching Race in the American Trials Collection
Slavery in Illinois
 Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
Art. 6. There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the
said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted: Provided, always, That any
person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully
claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully
reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or
service as aforesaid.
 Did not emancipate slaves that had already been brought into
the territory.
 Map
Illinois Constitution of 1818
 Allowed indentured servitude (as criminal sentence) and
slave labor in mines
 1840 Census still listed slaves in Illinois
 Constitution of 1848 abolished slavery in Illinois, but did
not give equal civil rights to blacks
 Constitution of 1870 eliminated all Constitutional legal
disabilities of blacks
Black Codes
 Since 1813, the Illinois Territory excluded free Negroes. 1813
[Ill Terr Laws 17]
 The State’s First Black Law was passed at the first session of
the General Assembly [1819 Ill Laws 354]
 Blacks without a certificate of freedom were deemed runaway
slaves, and forbidden to enter the state.
 A more severe Black Law was enacted in 1853, forbidding
blacks from another state to remain in the state for more than
10 days. [1853 Ill Laws 57]
 Illinois Black Codes (illustrated article)
 Repealed in 1865, after the ratification of the 14th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution
Later Developments
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Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Colonization movement
Dred Scott
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
 Illinois State Archives: Illinois Servitude and
Emancipation Records (1722–1863)
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