Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law by Giuliana Perrone (review)

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• Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law by Giuliana Perrone
• Emily Blanck

Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law. By Giuliana Perrone. Studies in Legal History. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 316. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-009- 21919-8.)

Since the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2010), critical race theory—legal theory around the systematic racism within the legal system—has become a central focus of popular and academic discourse about racial justice. Activists have since targeted policing and criminal justice as key places of reform. In Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law, Giuliana Perrone uncovers the pernicious ways the legal system enshrined slavery within virtually all its nooks and crannies. Abolition, she argues, was incomplete. Judges throughout the slaveholding South refused to dismantle the legal structures of slavery in several areas of the law that frequently go unnoticed: contract law, family law, and inheritance and succession. Perrone distinguishes between emancipation, as the end of coerced labor, and abolition, as the end of all systems that sustained the coerced labor system. To do this research, Perrone has dug deeply into the case law throughout the South, carefully unpacking the decisions of cases that directly impacted freedpeople during Reconstruction as well as areas of the law where Black people were not explicitly targeted.

One of the most refreshing aspects of Perrone’s book is the emphasis on an alternate outcome by focusing on abolitionist judges. Perrone finds that there was a large minority of judges who recognized that abolition was a [End Page 628] prescription to change the law and genuinely adjudicated to dismantle the vestiges of slavery. She begins her book with the unlikely abolitionist James Govan Taliaferro, a slaveholding Whig who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment. Decisions from dozens of judges (it is not clear in the book how many of these judges existed in the South), like Taliaferro, demonstrate that Jim Crow and the other ways that the law sustained slavery were not inevitable and that another path was available.

The book is largely organized according to different realms of the law. Perrone covers contract law, property rights, private law, the recognition of the end of slavery (which has a convenient chart by state), the legality of succession, citizenship, and marriage and family law. In each chapter, she lays out the abolitionist position and shows how the majority of judges pushed back against unraveling slavery to maintain aspects of the institution and to create a new racial social class system. In the end, the contractual and property rights of former plantation owners won because the federal government overreached in the Emancipation Proclamation. Judges decided that formerly enslaved people were not entitled to full citizenship rights in social and economic realms, setting the context for racial segregation and antimiscegenation law. Chapter 8 describes how the United States Supreme Court enshrined this wide body of law into the prevailing interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. The push for abolition ended with the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), which interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment in narrow terms. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was just a postscript formally enshrining the separate but equal condition. Perrone’s epilogue draws broad lessons from the book to call for a deeper dive into reforming the American legal system.

Perrone’s nuanced and thorough work has a great web of arguments and subarguments that make the book important but not widely accessible. She may have lost an opportunity in her final chapter to prescribe more specifically for activists and scholars how to extend her findings into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For scholars and professors of legal history, it would have been helpful to have a list of cases in the bibliography. This book is an important read for scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction, legal history, and African American history.

Emily Blanck Rowan University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...