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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia
Award-winning historian Tamika Y. Nunley has unearthed the stories of enslaved Black women charged by their owners with poisoning, theft, murder, infanticide, and arson. While free Black and white people accused of capital crimes received a hearing, trial, and, if convicted, an opportunity to appeal, none of these options were available to enslaved people. Conviction was final, and only the state or owners could spare their accused chattel of punishment by death. For enslaved women in Virginia, clemency was not uncommon, but Nunley shows why this act ultimately benefitted owners and punished the accused with sale outside of the state as the best possible outcome.
Demonstrating how crimes, convictions, and clemency functioned within a slave society that upheld the property interests of white Virginians, Nunley reveals the frequency with which owners preferred to keep the accused in bondage, which allowed them, behind the veil of paternalism, to continue to benefit from Black women's labor. This so-called clemency also sought to rob Black women of the power they exercised when they committed capital crimes. The testimonies that Nunley has collected and analyzed offer compelling glimpses of the self-identities forged by Black women as they attempted to resist enslavement and the limits of justice available to them in the antebellum courtroom.
Book Details
- Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
- Publish Date: Apr 4th, 2023
- Pages: 258
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.21in - 6.14in - 0.58in - 0.88lb
- EAN: 9781469673127
- Categories: • United States - 19th Century• Women• African American & Black
About the Author
Praise for this book
"Nunley has once again published a daring account of early American history that challenges and militates against the limits of the archive of slavery. . . . Demands of Justice is a shining testament to the capacity of Black feminist methodology to compellingly re-narrate early American history despite formidable archival challenges."--New England Journal of History
"The Demands of Justice, by delving into the lives of enslaved women who were accused of capital crimes, poses important questions about the nature of justice and clemency in antebellum Virginia. Anyone who is interested in the history of slavery, race, and gender in the Americas, legal history, or southern history should read this book."--Evan C. Rothera, The Civil War Monitor
"Nunley analyzes numerous legal cases of enslaved women and girls, giving them voice and showing how enslaved people strove to attain justice in an unjust society . . . . Recommended."--CHOICE
"By resurrecting enslaved women from the pages of accounts of violent cases, Nunley invites readers to understand their appearances in legal records as a rejoinder to the myriad structures that strove to define them and their choices."--Journal of American History
"This brave, important study poses haunting questions about the legal system during slavery. Through detail that is both rich and harrowing, Tamika Nunley uses the capital cases of enslaved Black women and girls to show how their alleged crimes challenged immoral laws and exposed the fictitious nature of justice in America. It will profoundly shape future histories of race, gender, and carceral regimes." --Kali Gross, author of Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso and co-author of A Black Women's History of the United States