Description: The five essays in Slave Laws in Virginia explore the ever-changing relationship between a major slave society and the laws that guided it. The topics covered are diverse: One essay, on the African judicial background of African American slaves, helps us understand the perspectives on law, crime, and punishment that slaves may have brought with them from Africa. Another essay focuses on Thomas Jefferson's relationship with the laws of slavery to show how they constrained slaveowners as well as bondpeople. Other topics covered in the collection include the capital punishment of slaves, nineteenth-century penal transportation of slaves from Virginia as related to the interstate slave trade and the changing market for slaves, and Virginia's experience with its own fugitive slave laws. Through the history of one large extended family of ex-slaves, Philip J. Schwarz's conclusion examines how the law shaped the interaction between former slaves and masters after emancipation. These discussions of the contexts of legal choices concerning slavery, as well as of decisions made about slavery in light of the law, illuminate a wide range of developments in the law of bondage, all of which affected the lives of both slaves and slaveowners. Yet the most important aspect of these legal developments, says Schwarz, was the interaction among various people - more and less powerful slaveowners, more and less assertive slaves, outsiders such as Northern abolitionists, and even African lawmakers - that resulted in both unwritten customary law and statutes.

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