Free State Slavery and Bound Labor (Gordon)
Faculty
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| Sarah Barringer Gordon Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, Emerita sbgordon@law.upenn.edu |
Additional Information
Satisfies Senior Writing RequirementNo
Class meets in person.
Course Continuity
Students are encouraged to stay home if you are ill or experience flu-like symptoms. If you miss a class for any reason, it is still your responsibility to make up the work missed.
I offer the following to students who miss class due to illness:
- If you are absent, due to illness or some other unavoidable circumstance, email me and I can ask for volunteers among your classmates to share their notes with you.
- I will make PowerPoint slides or other class materials routinely available on the course site to everyone in the class.
Meeting Times/Location
T 4:30PM - 6:30PM
Tanenbaum Hall 253
Category
Seminar
Credits
3.0
This seminar is designed to help law students pursue original research and writing in an area of vital importance. It grows out of the Penn & Slavery Project and now encompasses all of Pennsylvania and its surrounding states from the American Revolution through the end of the Civil War in 1865. During that period, Pennsylvania was ground zero for battles over slavery and freedom. Contentious freedom suits, the Underground Railroad, newspaper wars, gun fights and thuggery, treason cases, and more all unfolded here. This seminar invites students to do original research into the stories of Black refugees – including escaped, kidnapped, sojourning, and other temporary or permanent residents of Pennsylvania. We also encourage work on those who hunted them, and who helped make Pennsylvania such hard-fought ground. To give just one example, General Robert E. Lee kidnapped and enslave more than 150 free black people when he invaded Pennsylvania in 1863.
We have assembled an archive of statutes, legal cases, testimony, judicial and administrative decisions, newspaper stories, images, memoirs, maps, and more. We have also collected in New Jersey and Delaware, and Maryland and New York, neighboring jurisdictions that are relevant and open to further research.
There is lots more to be done, and students will contribute to that ongoing work. Many of these materials have never been the subject of sustained study or placed in their legal and historical context. Students can choose whether to contribute to archival collections to satisfy the requirements of the course, which will include substantive analysis and prep for posting online, as well as a presentation to the seminar, preferably including slides if possible and substantial explanation and analysis. Or they could write a research paper – in either case, your work will contribute both to our growing archive, the website that is under construction, and – most important -- to our knowledge and understanding of the law of slavery in free states. This historical legacy is long over-looked and deserves to be recovered as part of our understanding of slavery and its many effects in Pennsylvania and the entire mid-Atlantic region.
The seminar is a combined history/law offering, co-taught by Professors Sarah Barringer Gordon and Kathleen Brown. There will be a maximum of 14 students, split between law students and undergraduates, with distinct roles for each. Law students will pursue research and/or writing projects. They will be important guides for the work of undergraduates in the class.
Law students will choose their topics for research and/or writing in consultation with Professor Gordon and can pursue written, and/or digital or cinematic formats (or perhaps a combination) to report on their research. Their work will become part of the archive. Papers written for this course will satisfy the supervised writing requirement.
Each law student will also partner with one of seven undergraduates, who will be using the archive and pursuing their research – but who will need guidance on legal analysis and the role of legal documents (cases, indenture agreements, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, etc) in their work. In other words, law students will be helping teach the class to undergraduates. We will also have a law student TA, whose undergraduate training in the history of the period will be important for undergraduates, and who will be responsible for ensuring students understand deadlines, work closely with their law student partner, and so on.
The course website will be available to the public as well as to our students by the end of the semester, we hope, and we aim to provide new information and venues for research. The course therefore will involve considerations of how best to convey what we learn to a broader audience, as well as explorations of historical methods and collaborating archives, including the materials at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.