No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, With a New Preface (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures Book 18)

by Sean Wilentz

Between 1660 and 1710, virtually every English colony in the New World enacted laws defining slaves as conveyable property. Despite variations between colonies, they all grappled, David Brion Davis writes, with “the impossibility of acting consistently on the premise that men were things.”