About this item
A dramatic work of historical detection illuminating one of the most significant -- and long forgotten -- Supreme Court cases in American history.In 1820, a suspicious vessel was spotted lingering off the coast of northern Florida, the Spanish slave ship Antelope. Since the United States had outlawed its own participation in the international slave trade more than a decade before, the ship's almost 300 African captives were considered illegal cargo under American laws. But with slavery still a critical part of the American economy, it would eventually fall to the Supreme Court to determine whether or not they were slaves at all, and if so, what should be done with them.Bryant describes the captives' harrowing voyage through waters rife with pirates and governed by an array of international treaties.
About the Author
Jonathan M. Bryant writes about the nineteenth-century American South and American legal history. He is the author of How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County Georgia, 1850-1885 (2004) and Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope (2015) . Recent chapters he has written appear in Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2014) , and After Slavery (2013) . He is currently Professor of History at Georgia Southern University.
He likes nothing better than to travel to the places he writes about, to stand in the same places the people in his stories stood. He lives near the wonderful city of Savannah, and loves wandering the Historic District with a purpose - "This happened here!"
