Even before the Dred Scott decision, Stroud's book had extensive influence upon national legal thinking on the issue of slavery. In a blanket survey of slave codes of the period, he analyzed the statutes of twelve slaveholding states and drew upon works written by judges in many of those states. Stroud's book on slave laws, therefore, exposed to the world, through its publications in 1827 and 1856, the diabolical nature of the legal enactments throughout the South that debased both African people and those who held them in bondage.

... It is for this reason that Stroud's book became such an important work of the nineteenth century, and continues to offer lessons of national importance today.

- From the Introduction

CATEGORY

History, Afrcia