Abstract
“Shadows of Law: Melville, Stowe, and the Government of Freedom” charts the shifting relations between legal authority and African-American civil rights from the 1850s to ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments in the 1860s. Focusing on the function of trope of the law’s shadow in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Melville’s Battle-Pieces (1866), the essay records the process whereby the law was transformed in antislavery discourse over the course of the 1850s from an incident of slavery into a necessary instrument in the maintenance of freedom. Where important early abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison often suggested that the law itself entailed slavery, the measures which actually effected the abolition of slavery imply that freedom is essentially a legal condition. “Shadows of Law” deploys careful readings of Stowe, Melville, and several contemporaneous legal landmarks (most importantly, Dred Scott v. Sandford)to explain how this reversal could come to pass.
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