John Marshall

Online
Essay
John Marshall’s Proslavery Jurisprudence: Racism, Property, and the “Great” Chief Justice
Paul Finkelman
President and Professor of History, Gratz College. B.A., Syracuse, 1971; M.A. and Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 1972, 1976. Fellow in Law and Humanities, Harvard Law School, 1982–83. President William McKinley Emeritus Professor of Law, Albany Law School.

I thank Candace Jackson Gray for her help in researching census and tax records connected to Chief Justice Marshall’s slaveholding, and Charles F. Hobson, Tim Huebner, Alysa Landry, and R. Kent Newmyer for their many comments on early versions of this piece. I thank Harvard University Press for allowing me to reprint material in this essay that comes from my book, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (Harvard 2018).

This is the second Essay in a two-part series exploring Chief Justice John Marshall’s private and public relationship to slavery.

John Marshall Legal History Slavery
Online
Essay
Master John Marshall and the Problem of Slavery
Paul Finkelman
President and Professor of History, Gratz College. B.A., Syracuse, 1971; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1972, 1976. Fellow in Law and Humanities, Harvard Law School, 1982–83. President William McKinley Emeritus Professor of Law, Albany Law School.

I thank Candace Jackson Gray for her help in researching census and tax records connected to Marshall’s slaveholding, and Charles F. Hobson, Tim Huebner, Alysa Landry, and R. Kent Newmyer for their many comments on early versions of this piece.

This is the first of two Essays exploring Chief Justice John Marshall’s private and public relationship to slavery.

John Marshall Legal History Slavery

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