The Abolition of Slavery: A Case of Historical Moral Innovation

March 26, 2014
4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. EDT
Location: Berkley Center third floor conference room Map

The abolition of slavery affords us an opportunity to reflect upon a concrete historical instance of moral innovation—the abolition of slavery— and to ask why and how it happened, and how to write its history. Adam Rothman examined these questions through the presentation of a chapter from his forthcoming book, The Last Slaves of New Orleans, which tells the story of the kidnapping of three slave children in New Orleans during the Civil War. The story reveals the history of wartime emancipation as an intimate struggle between masters and slaves that was fought, at least in part, far from the famous battlefields of the war. The chapter examines a court case pitting the children's mother against her former owner's wife, who was put on trial for kidnapping the children in New Orleans in April 1865.
This workshop was the second of three sponsored this spring by the Normative Orders Collaborative, an interdisciplinary and international effort to foster thinking about moral change and moral innovation. The collaborative is a tri-lateral effort wherein Georgetown University and Fudan University (Shanghai) will work with and extend the pioneering efforts of the Cluster of Excellence on the Formation of Normative Orders at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The centerpiece of Georgetown’s contribution to this effort in the coming year will be a full-year faculty and graduate student seminar on Moral Innovation that will be led in 2014-15 by Professors Henry Richardson and Terry Pinkard.

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