| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Judith Kelleher Schafer. Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Pres. 2003. Pp. xxiv, 204. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.
This book explores the ways in which slaves and free blacks used the New Orleans courts to gain, keep, and, in a few cases, relinquish their freedom. Judith Kelleher Schafer has made a career of documenting and interpreting Louisiana's legal system as it applied to slavery, and her new book is a fine addition to her previous scholarship. What Schafer demonstrates is that slaves suing to acquire or maintain freedom in New Orleans courts were remarkably successful, at least until sectional controversy heated up in the mid-1850s.	1
Many scholars of antebellum black history have written about the wave of antiblack legislation passed by southern state legislatures in an effort to control their free populations. But while many, myself included, have set these laws in the context of diminishing liberty, fewer scholars have looked at the daily impact that such laws had on individuals and how they responded to them. Laws reducing the rights of free blacks, particularly those that restricted their movement in southern states, could force people apart from family members and make them liable for imprisonment or even enslavement when they could not comply.	. . .

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