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Bonds of Empire Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2021
The book concludes with a preview of slave law in the early republic. Although independence transformed English subjects into American citizens, much about slave law remained the same; English law and English legal procedure continued to be useful for citizens living in a slaveholders’ republic. Republican legal forms were not, in the end, significantly different from forms used under a monarchy, and this had far-reaching consequences. In particular, this legal continuity from the colonial period meant that the commodification of slaves not only continued, but also spread along with the expanding United States. Settlers in new plantation areas of the Deep South, who were steeped in a legal culture that valued tradition, modeled their slave laws on those of South Carolina, and therefore on the language, practices, and precedents of English chattel slavery. The plantation society that they constructed, by hewing so closely to English legal forms, perpetuated the invidious legal fiction that people were things as a working reality in the slave South.
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