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The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History. By Stephen Middleton. (Westport: Greenwood, 1993. xxx, 427 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-313-28016-9.)
Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900-1991. By Joseph C. Miller. (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1993. xvii, 556 pp. ISBN 0-527-63660-6.)
These two works seek to illuminate the troubling presence of slavery in human history. Stephen Middleton's work might be viewed as a microstudy, Joseph C. Miller's, as a macrostudy. Both are works of prodigious scholarship. Middleton concentrates on the existence of black laws in the Northwest Territory of the rapidly expanding new nation, the United States. Miller, assisted by a corps of scholars that includes some of his former graduate students at the University of Virginia, has compiled possibly the most complete comparative bibliography of slavery in print. Neither work constitutes a problem-oriented piece of research; both are meant specifically as reference works for other scholars.
Middletown's work will be most useful for American scholars engaged in the ongoing debate about the nature of black bondage and freedom in America. He divides his work into five sections, one for each of the five states the territory became: Ohio became a state in 1803; Indiana, in 1816; Illinois, in 1818; Michigan, in 1837; and Wisconsin, in 1848. Each section is headed by a brief exploratory introduction, and the major portion of the chapter is given over to documents demonstrating the laws and practices that limited black freedom in a time of expanding democratic ideas and enactments. The closing section of each chapter discusses and cites cases relating to black challenges to the discriminatory policy.
The author's point of departure is Article...