Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North 1780-1861

Reprint of first and only edition. Originally published: Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. xii, 253 pp. * The Personal Liberty Laws reflected the social ethical commitment to freedom from slavery and as such were among the bricks that laid the foundation for the Fourteenth Amendment. Morris examines those statutes as enacted in the five representative states Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin, and argues that these laws were an alternative to the violence allowed by the southern slave codes and the extreme abolitionist viewpoints of the north.