Seattle University Collaborative Projects - International Academy of ...

The Treatment of Slaves as Human in Colonial New EnglandWilliam E. Nelson, New York University (william.nelson@nyu.edu)According to the law of colonial Virginia, slaves were chattels ― "considered," according to the1730 case of Tucker v. Sweney, "no otherwise than horses or cattle." In colonial New England,in contrast, slaves were treated as human beings. One key example makes the point. In Virginia,slaves were not permitted to marry, but female slaves were encouraged to have sex, to reproduce,and thereby increase the wealth of their masters. In New England, on the other hand, black slaveslike free white people were punished if they engaged in sexual activity or produced childrenoutside of marriage. My presentation will focus on this as well as other differences in thetreatment of slaves ― differences that reflected New Englanders' recognition of their slaves'humanity. How can one account for this difference? The answer is not an economic one: NewEnglanders worked their slaves as hard and exploited them every bit as much as did Virginians.Rather, as I hope to show in my presentation, the answer lies in law and in the realm of ideas.Mental Degeneracy, Eugenics and the Honeymoon Homicide of 1936Paul A. Lombardo, Georgia State University (plombardo@gsu.edu)In April, 1936, sixty year old bachelor farmer Dan Shine married his twenty-four year oldhousekeeper Pearl Hines. When Dan's body was found only five days after the wedding, thecause of death appeared to be suicide, but within hours his bride was charged with murder.Pearl's mother Minnie was the notorious head of a family that included seventeen other children.The degenerate ways of that "mentally deficient" clan were so infamous that a student at the stateuniversity made them the focus of her thesis. For the next year, newspaper articles and detectivemagazines described the trials that followed for Pearl and her accomplices. Other documentscaptured the aftermath of criminal proceedings, as Pearl's siblings were sterilized to remove thepotential for another generation of criminals. This paper will analyze the "honeymoon homicide"and its aftermath. The episode demonstrates the resilience of eugenic mythologies about"problem families" and a theory of hereditary degeneracy that harkened back to RichardDugdale's 19th Century book The Jukes, still used in this late 1930s true crime saga to framepopular understandings of crime, poverty, mental defect and social disorder.Psychiatric Power and Practice in 19th Century State Asylums: Newcomer v.VanDeusenMary deYoung, Grand Valley State University (deyoungm@gvsu.edu)181