Freedom's bonds: Reconfiguring formal freedom in antebellum U.S. law and literature, 1820--1860

"Freedom's Bonds" is a project about the aesthetic liveliness of legal formal freedom in the antebellum United States. The center of the project is the idea of legal formal freedom, a phrase that I use to indicate the conceptual criteria through which antebellum law formally recognized a subject as being free. I isolate four of these criteria in my project. In the antebellum United States, a legally free subject had the ability to form contracts, was a sovereign entity, was in possession of rights, and had the ability to associate with others to advance common interests. Contract, Sovereignty, Rights, and Association thus compose the keywords that anchor each chapter's exploration of the aesthetic dimensions of legal formal freedom. Of course, Native and African American people, among others, were purposefully denied legal freedom during the period I study, most obviously through the legally sanctioned operations of chattel slavery and Native dispossession. While taking these failures of the law into account, this project queries the nature and modes by which antebellum writers of color interacted with a legal system that overwhelmingly did not view them as subjects of lawful freedom. "Freedom's Bonds" contends that aesthetics offers a democratized mode of engagement with the period's racially circumscribed notions of legal formal freedom. As a discipline, aesthetics is often linked to notions of elitist, specialized discourses of good taste and refined artistic sensibilities. However, " Freedom's Bonds " seeks to trace an alternative genealogy of the aesthetic as a democratic method that is rooted in people's ability to make sense of law's abstract policies through the shared human capacity of sense perception.