Black Trials (eBook)

Mark S. Weiner (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2007 | 1. Auflage
448 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-42503-4 (ISBN)

Infos

From a brilliant young legal scholar comes this sweeping history of American ideas of belonging and citizenship, told through the stories of fourteen legal cases that helped to shape our nation.Spanning three centuries, Black Trials details the legal challenges and struggles that helped define the ever-shifting identity of blacks in America. From the well-known cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the more obscure trial of Joseph Hanno, an eighteenth-century free black man accused of murdering his wife and bringing smallpox to Boston, Weiner recounts the essential dramas of American identity--illuminating where our conception of minority rights has come from and where it might go. Significant and enthralling, these are the cases that forced the courts and the country to reconsider what it means to be black in America, and Mark Weiner illuminates their lasting importance for our society.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

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   From a brilliant young legal scholar comes this sweeping history of American ideas of belonging and citizenship, told through the stories of fourteen legal cases that helped to shape our nation.   Spanning three centuries, Black Trials details the legal challenges and struggles that helped define the ever-shifting identity of blacks in America. From the well-known cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the more obscure trial of Joseph Hanno, an eighteenth-century free black man accused of murdering his wife and bringing smallpox to Boston, Weiner recounts the essential dramas of American identity—illuminating where our conception of minority rights has come from and where it might go. Significant and enthralling, these are the cases that forced the courts and the country to reconsider what it means to be black in America, and Mark Weiner demonstrates their lasting importance for our society.

Textauszug

Let Us Make a Tryal On May 2, 1721, in Boston, Massachusetts, with New England still contentedly oblivious to the smallpox epidemic that was about to descend, a free black man went on trial for murder. His name was Joseph Hanno, and he was 'distinguished from the most of his Complexion' by the breadth of his Christian learning and knowledge of the Bible.The victim was Hanno's wife, a prominent free woman named Nanny Negro. Authorities accused Hanno of beating Nanny over the head with the blunt edge of an ax as she was preparing to go to bed and then slitting her throat with a razor-a 'barbarous' and 'uncommon' act that struck at one of the central institutions of Puritan society, the holy covenant of marriage.Two months later, as the first red blotches of the pox began to appear on town residents, Joseph Hanno was hanged. Within a year, over 800 Bostonians would succumb to plague and be buried near the town common. It is uncertain how Hanno's executioners disposed of his remains, but they probably did so with little ceremony. They may have given his corpse to a group of slaves and freemen to inter near Copp's Hill, in Boston's North End. In life, Joseph Hanno was a man of no special consequence. But his crime made him notorious, and to the anxious Puritan mind, which believed that individual crimes reflected the moral state of society as a whole, the outbreak of pox just before his execution must have seemed like a divine punishment visited on a community of sinners. Indeed, Cotton Mather, who was deeply concerned with the spiritual welfare of blacks-he was something of a spiritual egalitarian-had ministered to Hanno in prison, and accused him of bringing 'plagues upon all about you.' Mather also gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon just before Hanno's execution, drawing a 'vast assembly' into the Old North Church as scores of colonists came to gaze upon the doomed ex-slave and consider how the evil deeds of this 'miserable African' reflected on their newly afflicted town. Sin. Sickness. Slavery. Law. Hanno's case had illuminated the racial tensions that lay at the heart of Puritan society and spiritual life. In this story of a poor black criminal brought face-to-face with one of the most prominent divines of the English colonies, we find a question at the dramatic center of American history: what place could blacks have within a civic order defined by a commitment to Christian principles? Cotton Mather had one answer, far more complex than we might expect. In the antebellum South, many Christian slaveholders would hold another view. In the fire of the Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, John Brown, an inheritor of Mather's Puritan tradition, would claim yet another. And in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., would offer one more still. The tensions within Mather's answer suggested some of these possible futures. It was wintertime in New England the night Joseph Hanno killed his wife, when the sun sinks quickly on the horizon. It was a Thursday, and perhaps Nanny felt grateful to be home after a strenuous day of cooking, cleaning, and other chores for some local white family. She had Sunday to look forward to, the Christian day of rest. Or she may have sat at the edge of a bed in a small house in the North End, filled with resentment at her lot in the world, cursing her god or gods, or the man she married. The two certainly did not get along. Months later, while languishing in prison, Hanno would complain that his wife was ill-tempered and treated him poorly, making his life miserable. Did the two have a fight when Hanno came in late? Did Hanno provoke a confrontation? All we know is that Nanny ended up lying...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.12.2007
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• ISBN-10: 0-307-42503-7 / 0307425037
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-42503-4 / 9780307425034