Abstract
Cultural sociologists of morality should not restrict themselves to a narrow focus on the ideal dimensions of moral systems, nor to aspects of moral orders best understood relativistically and from the perspective of social constructivism. Moral facts, in Durkheim’s sense, are also an important focus. In particular, this chapter argues that cultural sociologists of morality should attend to relational moral facts, that is to say, facts about the relationships between moral systems as they are realized and made manifest in the social world. Such facts are important for constructing sociological explanations because the factual status of an observation can be significant for understanding the causal mechanisms through which it drives and is driven by dynamics in the social world. This chapter adopts this framework to examine the relationship between institutionalized slavery and the rule of law in the United States in the early to mid-nineteenth century, focusing on what it characterizes as the relational moral fact of the contradictory and irreconcilable positions of these moral systems on the question of private violence and the analytical implications of describing this relationship as a fact and not simply as a constructed moral meaning.
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Notes
- 1.
The formal abolition of slavery in Canada came at the same time as its ends throughout the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (3 & 4 William IV, c.73).
- 2.
As Scott writes in a different context, “the frontier underwrote popular freedom” (Scott, 2010: 4).
- 3.
Letter from William R. Stuart, President of Maryland Senate, to the President of New Jersey Senate. Mrs. Ford K. Brown Collection MSA SC 247: Materials Accumulated by Ezekiel F. Chambers, Judge from 1834 to 1851. Available at http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5400/sc5496/034600/034613/images/njsenate_letter.pdf, accessed October 15, 2022. For a summary Maryland archival holdings on the Hemsley case and its background see http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5400/sc5496/051200/051248/html/051248bio.html, accessed October 15, 2022.
- 4.
However, the decision in the landmark fugitive slave case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1842, Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, involved a question about the 1826 law that the Pennsylvania legislature passed in response to the same Maryland delegation. Pennsylvania’s law was more protective of the rights of accused fugitives from slavery than New Jersey’s 1826 supplement to its fugitive slave law, and far more protective than Delaware’s. The decision contains a brief encapsulation of this maximal view of a private freedom of violent action possessed by slave owners. The Court writes: “Upon this ground, we have not the slightest hesitation in holding that, under and in virtue of the Constitution, the owner of a slave is clothed with entire authority, in every State in the Union, to seize and recapture his slave whenever he can do it without any breach of the peace or any illegal violence. In this sense and to this extent, this clause of the Constitution may properly be said to execute itself, and to require no aid from legislation, state or national” (Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 613 (1842).
- 5.
“A Supplement to an Act Entitled ‘An Act Concerning Slaves,’” 1826.
- 6.
This state of affairs turned on both the 1826 supplement to New Jersey’s fugitive slave law discussed above and also to the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 and the U.S. Constitution’s fugitive slave clause.
- 7.
Hornblower, Joseph C. 1836. Opinion of Chief Justice Hornblower on the Fugitive Slave Law. New Jersey. p. 4.
- 8.
This very issue had just come before Hornblower and the N.J. Superior Court. In that case the court ruled against the interpretation that people of color could be assumed on a prima facie basis to be bound to slave labor and thus required to prove that they were free, instead requiring the opposite assumption and placing the burden of proof on the slave catchers (Gigantino, 2014: 419).
- 9.
Hornblower, Joseph C. 1836. Opinion of Chief Justice Hornblower on the Fugitive Slave Law. New Jersey. p. 5–6.
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Norton, M. (2023). Culture, Morality, and the Matter of Facts. In: Hitlin, S., Dromi, S.M., Luft, A. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Volume 2 . Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32022-4_20
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