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  3. Jefferson's Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion
  • Cited by 18
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2012
Print publication year:
2012
Online ISBN:
9781139084154
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139084154
Subjects:
American History: General Interest, Legal History, Law, History, Early Republic and Antebellum History
Series:
Cambridge Studies on the American South
Information

Book description

Jefferson's Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion explores the historical processes by which Virginia was transformed from a British colony into a Southern slave state. It focuses on changing conceptualizations of ownership and emphasizes the persistent influence of the English common law on Virginia's postcolonial political culture. The book explains how the traditional characteristics of land tenure became subverted by the dynamic contractual relations of a commercial economy and assesses the political consequences of the law reforms that were necessitated by these developments. Nineteenth-century reforms seeking to reconcile the common law with modern commercial practices embraced new democratic expressions about the economic and political power of labor, and thereby encouraged the idea that slavery was an essential element in sustaining republican government in Virginia. By the 1850s, the ownership of human property had replaced the ownership of land as the distinguishing basis for political power, with tragic consequences for the Old Dominion.

Reviews

'Curtis offers an erudite study of the legal basis of property ownership in Virginia between the American Revolution and the 1850s.'

Source: The Journal of American History

'In his doggedly intelligent study of the legal culture of possession in late colonial and antebellum Virginia, Christopher Michael Curtis shows that the abundance of scholarship on Thomas Jefferson has a point beyond the hagiographic: Jefferson remains an important point of departure for understanding the early south.'

Christopher Tomlins Source: Journal of Southern History

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