Degraded Caste of Society - (Southern Legal Studies) by Andrew T Fede (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A Degraded Caste of Society uses antebellum US appellate court options and statues to illuminate "two competing criminal law doctrines that applied" to free Black people: "equal protection and unequal protection based on perceptions of race." These doctrines, Fede argues, "reflect the broader social conflicts between two competing legal cultures and legal consciousnesses. The legacy of these laws "continued to live on" until 2009 legislation made this sort of violence a federal crime. The unequal protection doctrine, which has its roots in the antebellum US, has a "long but not always completely acknowledged" or understood influence on criminal law in the United States"--

Book Synopsis

A Degraded Caste of Society traces the origins of twenty-first-century cases of interracial violence to the separate and unequal protection principles of the criminal law of enslavement in the southern United States. Andrew T. Fede explains how antebellum appellate court opinions and statutes, when read in a context that includes newspaper articles and trial court and census records, extended this doctrine to the South's free Black people, consigning them to what South Carolina justice John Belton O'Neall called "a degraded caste of society," in which they were "in no respect, on a perfect equality with the white man."

This written law either criminalized Black insolence or privileged private white interracial violence, which became a badge of slavery that continued to influence the law in action, contrary to the Constitution's mandate of equal protection of the criminal law. The U.S. Supreme Court enabled this denial of equal justice, as did Congress, which did not make all private white racially motivated violence a crime until 2009, when it adopted the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

Fede's analysis supports that law's constitutionality under the Thirteenth Amendment, while suggesting why--during the Jim Crow era and beyond--equal protection of the criminal law was not always realized, and why the curse of interracial violence has been a lingering badge of slavery.

Review Quotes

Academic audiences will appreciate this scholarly overview.--Harry Charles "Library Journal"

Andrew T. Fede offers a wealth of valuable research regarding how slavery shaped American law in practice.--Jeannine Marie DeLombard "author of In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity"

This compelling account traces the modern-day legitimization of racial violence to its foundation in antebellum law; Andrew Fede brilliantly demonstrates that the arc of slavery is indeed long.--Jenny Bourne Wahl "author of The Bondsman's Burden: An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery"

A Degraded Caste of Society does a remarkable job of taking a seemingly narrow dimension of the law and race relations to reveal a much broader argument about the antebellum South.--Mark Tushnet "author of The Constitution of the United States of America: A Contextual Analysis"

About the Author

ANDREW T. FEDE is of counsel to the law firm Archer & Greiner, P.C., based in New Jersey, and, since 1986, has been an adjunct professor teaching law courses at Montclair State University. He is the author of Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic World, Roadblocks to Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the United States South, and People without Rights: An Interpretation of the Fundamentals of the Law of Slavery in the U.S. South.