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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Forgotten Emancipator
  • Cited by 2
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2017
Print publication year:
2017
Online ISBN:
9781316155059
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316155059
Series:
Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society
Subjects:
Legal History, Area Studies, American Studies, American History 1861-1900, US Law, Law, History
Information

Book description

Congressman James Mitchell Ashley, a member of the House of Representatives from 1858 to 1868, was the main sponsor of the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution, which declared the institution of slavery unconstitutional. Rebecca E. Zietlow uses Ashley's life as a unique lens through which to explore the ideological origins of Reconstruction and the constitutional changes of this era. Zietlow recounts how Ashley and his antislavery allies shared an egalitarian free labor ideology that was influenced by the political antislavery movement and the nascent labor movement - a vision that conflicted directly with the institution of slavery. Ashley's story sheds important light on the meaning and power of popular constitutionalism: how the constitution is interpreted outside of the courts and the power that citizens and their elected officials can have in enacting legal change. The book shows how Reconstruction not only expanded racial equality but also transformed the rights of workers throughout America.

Reviews

'Rebecca E. Zietlow is right - James Mitchell Ashley has been all but forgotten and deserves to be remembered. Thanks to Zietlow, we can now appreciate Ashley's pivotal role in the pre-Civil War struggle against slavery, abolition during the war, and the battle for black rights during Reconstruction. But she also emphasizes his commitment to the rights of all labourers, and we would benefit today from recalling his vision of a 'free labour' society of equals.'

Eric Foner - Columbia University, New York

'James Mitchell Ashley spent decades of the nineteenth century crusading against slavery, discrimination, and labor injustice - positions in absolute harmony with one another, as the author Rebecca E. Zietlow deftly shows. This readable biography reveals Ashley in his heroism, defeat, and contradictions. More than that, it illuminates the challenges that any old-line egalitarian faced in a modern, industrializing world. In Zietlow’s able hands, Ashley’s life becomes as significant for our present era as it was for his own.'

Michael Vorenberg - Brown University, Rhode Island

'An impressively informative and original work of seminal scholarship from beginning to end, The Forgotten Emancipator is unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library 19th century American history collections and supplemental studies reading lists.'

Source: Midwest Book Review

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Contents

Contents
References

Bibliography

Archives

  • Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress

  • Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University

  • John M. Morgan papers relating to James M. Ashley, University of Toledo libraries, Ward M. Canaday Center Manuscript Collection (“Morgan Papers”)

  • Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Convention, held at Putnam, on the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third of April, 1835 (Beaumont and Wallace, Printers)

  • Salmon P. Chase, An Argument for the Defendant, Submitted to the Supreme Court of the United States, as the December Term, 1846: In the Case of Wharton Jones vs. John Vanzandt (1847)

  • Salmon P. Chase Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Articles

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Gourevitch, Alex. “Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work,” Political Theory 41 (May 2013): 591.
Graber, Mark. “The Second Freedman’s Bureau Bill’s Constitution,” Texas Law Review 94 (2016): 1361.
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Klarman, Michael J. “Rethinking the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Revolutions,” Virginia Law Review 82 (1996): 1.
Lofton, William H. “Appeal of the Abolitionists to the Northern Working Classes,” The Journal of Negro History 33, no. 3 (July 1948): 249.
McLain, Charles J. “The Chinese Struggle for Civil Rights in Nineteenth Century America: The First Phase, 1850–1870,” California Law Review 72 (1984): 529.
McPherson, James M. “America’s Greatest Movement,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 2016.
Morgan, Denise C., and Zietlow, Rebecca E.. “The New Parity Debate: Congress and Rights of Belonging,” Cincinnati Law Review 73 (2005): 1347.
Nice, Julie A. “Whither the Canaries? On the Exclusion of Poor People from Equal Constitutional Protection,” Drake Law Review 60 (2012): 1023.
Ontiveros, Maria. “Immigrant Workers’ Rights in a Post-Hoffman World: Organizing around the 13th Amendment,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 18 (2004): 651.
Ontiveros, Maria. “Is Modern Day Slavery a Private Act or a Public System of Oppression?” Seattle University Law Review 39 (2016): 665.
Pinckney, Darryll. “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” New York Review of Books, January 2, 2017.
Pope, James Gray. “Contract, Race, and Freedom of Labor in the Constitutional Law of ‘Involuntary Servitude,’” Yale Law Journal 119 (2010): 1474.
Pope, James Gray. “Labor’s Constitution of Freedom,” Yale Law Journal 106 (1997): 941.
Pope, James Gray. “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Law and the Racial Divide in the American Working Class, 1676–1974,” Texas Law Review 94 (2016): 1555.
Pope, James Gray, and Zietlow, Rebecca E.. “The Auto-Lite Strike and the Fight against ‘Wage Slavery,’” University of Toledo Review 38 (2007): 839. Reprinted in Kenneth M. Casebeer, ed., American Labor Struggles and Law Histories (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011).
Post, Robert C., and Siegel, Reva B.. “Legislative Constitutionalism and Section Five Power: Policentric Interpretations of the Family and Medical Leave Act,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003): 1943.
Richardson, Heather Cox. “Legacies of Lincoln Symposium, Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Principle,” Marquette Law Review (2010): 1383.
Soifer, Aviam. “Federal Protection, Paternalism, and the Virtually Forgotten Prohibition of Voluntary Peonage,” Columbia Law Review 112 (2012): 1607.
tenBroek, Jacobus. “Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: Consummation to Abolition and Key to the Fourteenth Amendment,” California Law Review 39 (1951): 171.
VanderVelde, Lea S. “Henry Wilson, Cobbler of the Frayed Constitution, Strategist of the Thirteenth Amendment,” Georgetown Journal of Law and Politics 15 (2017): 173.
VanderVelde, Lea S. “The Labor Vision of the Thirteenth Amendment,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 138 (1989): 437.
VanderVelde, Lea S. “The Thirteenth Amendment of Our Aspirations,” University of Toledo Law Review 38(2007): 855.
Wang, Xi. “The Making of Federal Enforcement Laws, 1870–1872,” Chicago Kent Law Review 70 (1995): 1013.
Waterson, Liz, and Swanberg, Jennifer. “Flexible Workplace Solutions for Low-Wage Hourly Workers: A Framework for a National Conversation,” American University Labor and Employment Law Forum 3 (2013): 380.
Weiss, Marley. “Human Trafficking and Forced Labor: A Primer,” ABA Journal on Labor and Employment Law 31 (2015): 1.
Weld, Theodore Dwight. “The Power of Congress over the District of Columbia,” The Antislavery Examiner No. 6. Reprinted from the New York Evening Post, with additions by the author, published by the American Antislavery Society (New York, 1838).
Zedlewski, Sheila R. “Work Activity and Obstacles to Work among TANF Recipients,” The Urban Institute (1999), www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=309091.
Zietlow, Rebecca E. “Free at Last! Anti-Subordination and the Thirteenth Amendment,” Boston University Law Review 90 (2010): 255.
Zietlow, Rebecca E. “The Political Thirteenth Amendment,” Maryland Law Review 71 (2011): 283.
Zietlow, Rebecca E. “A Positive Right to Free Labor,” Seattle University Law Review 39 (2016): 859.
Zietlow, Rebecca E. “The Rights of Citizenship: Two Framers, Two Amendments,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 11 (2009): 1269.

Books

Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
Arnett, Benjamin, ed. Duplicate Copy of the Souvenir from the Afro-American League of Tennessee to Hon. James M. Ashley of Ohio (Philadelphia: Publishing House of the AME Church, 1894).
Ashley, Charles S. “Governor Ashley’s Biography and Messages,” in Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana (Helena, MT: Rocky Mountain Publishing, 1907).
Baer, Judith A. Equality under the Constitution: Reclaiming the Fourteenth Amendment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
Baruch, Mildred C., and Beckman, Ellen J.. Civil War Union Monuments (Washington, DC: Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, 1978).
Beatty, Paul. The Sell Out (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015).
Benedict, Michael Les. A Compromise of Principle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974).
Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2009).
Bowers, Claude G. The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (1929).
Boyle, Kevin. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: H. Holt, 2004).
Brandwein, Pamela. Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and the Production of Historical Truth (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Curtis, Michael Kent. No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986).
Deyrup, Marta Mestrovic, and Harrington, Maura Grace. The Irish-American Experience in New Jersey and Metropolitan New York: Cultural Identity, Hybridity, and Commemoration (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014).
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Efford, Alison Clark. German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp, 1996).
Finkelman, Paul, Gallagher, Gary W., and Wagner, Margaret E.. The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
Fladeland, Betty. James Gillespie Birney, Slaveholder to Abolitionist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955).
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Foner, Eric. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: American’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Collins, 1988).
Foner, Philip Sheldon. History of the Labor Movement of the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1947).
Foner, Philip S., and Shapiro, Herbert, eds. Northern Labor and Antislavery: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).
Foner, Philip S., and Walker, George E., eds. Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
George, Harold A. Civil War Monuments of Ohio (Mansfield, OH: Book Masters, 2006).
Goluboff, Risa L. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Goodell, William. Views of American Constitutional Law, in Its Bearing upon American Slavery (Utica, NY: Jackson & Chaplain, 1844).
Grubb, Farley. German Immigration and Servitude in America, 1709–1920 (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Horowitz, Robert F. The Great Impeacher: A Political Biography of James M. Ashley (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1979).
Jones, William P. The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
Jones-Deweever, Avis, Peterson, Janice, and Song, Xue, Before and after Welfare Reform: The Work and Well-Being of Low-Income Single Parent Families (Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2003).
Kersch, Ken I. Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Kramer, Larry D. The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
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Magliocca, Gerard. American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment (New York: NYU Press, 2013).
Mantler, Gordon Keith. Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
Matthews, Jean W. Women’s Struggle for Equality: The First Phase, 1828–1876 (Chicago: Ivan V. Dee, 1997).
Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans 1862–1872 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1967).
Montgomery, David. Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
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Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
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Phillips, Wendell. A Review of Lysander Spooner’s Essay on the Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston: Andrew Prentiss, 1847).
Richards, Leonard L. Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Richardson, Heather Fox. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Richardson, James D., ed. Messages and Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1789–1897 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896–99).
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Sewell, Richard H. Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
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Statutes

A Bill to Designate the United States Courthouse located at 1716 Spielbusch Avenue in Toledo, Ohio as the “James M. Ashley and Thomas W. L. Ashley United States Courthouse”; H.R. 3712, P.L. 110–284 (July 23, 2008)
Anti-Peonage Act, March 2, 1867, ch. 187, 14 Stat. 546, now codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. §1581 et seq. and 42 U.S.C. §1994
Civil Rights Act of 1866, ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27 (codified at 42 U.S.C. §§1981–1983 (2000)
Civil Rights Act of 1870, ch. 114, §16, 16 Stat. 140, 144 (1869–1871)
The Freedmen’s Bureau Act, 14 Stat. 174, 176–177 (1866)
Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, ch. 7, 1 Stat. 302 (repealed 1864)
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, ch. 60, 9 Stat. 462 (repealed 1864)
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104–193, 110 Stat. 2105 (1996) (codified at 42 U.S.C. §§601–619 (2006))
Seattle Secure Scheduling Ordinance, SMC 14.22 (effective July 1, 2017)
Social Security Act of 1935, 42 U.S.C. §§401–406
Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, Pub. L. No. 106–386, §102(b)(22), 114, Stat. 1464

Constitutional Provisions

  • U.S. Const. art. I, §2, cl. 3

  • U.S. Const. art. I, §9, cl. 1

  • U.S. Const. art. IV, §2, cl. 3

  • U.S. Const, art. IV, §4

  • U.S. Const. amend. XIII

  • U.S. Const. amend. XIV

Court Cases

Barron v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 243 (1833)
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970)
Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)
Jones v. Alfred Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409 (1968)
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007)
Pollock v. Williams, 322 U.S. 4 (1944)
Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 (1842)
Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275 (1897)
Slaughter House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873)
United States v. Driscoll, 96 U.S. 421 (1877)
Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886)

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