Academic

The Morality of Doing Research Using Proslavery Treatises

By propertyprof

This is a problem you don't face everyday.  I'm in the midst of a short paper on the University of Mississippi's trial of its Chancellor (incidentally F.A.P. Barnard, the namesake of Columbia University's Barnard College) for taking testimony of a slave against a student.   Really fascinating stuff, because we usually think about trials as about truth, but there was great concern about taking the testimony of enslaved people against whites. 

There's a lot that needs to be said about this topic.  Right now, though, I'm interested in knowing about the key cases from southern courts.  So I have the question: should I use T.R.R. Cobb's treatise on slave law?  Cobb was a pretty important person in the old South: he edited the Georgia Code, taught for a while at the University of Georgia, and published a comprehensive treatise on slave law.  (He occupies a key place in my current book project, University, Court, and Slave.)  Now, I've used the treatise a bunch as evidence of thought at the time.  But now I have a different purpose in mind: to use it as a source of cases.  There is something that I find more than a little disturbing about "communicating" with General Cobb (he died fighting at Fredericksburg) in this way.  For this is not just reading his work to understand his mind, but reading his work to learn about what the law actually was.

I guess that's how the progress of knowledge works, though--we use the literature of those before us.

Alfred Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 28, 2008 (boomark / email).