The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North

Author/Contributor(s):	Hartog, Hendrik
Publisher:	University of North Carolina Press
Date:	08/01/2020
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

"Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate -- about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy" -- became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "good Samaritans." Using Minna's case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free"--