Madison Ogletree is a Consortium Dissertation Fellow at Penn’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation “Law, Free People of Color, and the Making of the Old South, 1760-1860,” examines the problem of freedom in slave society, the everyday lives of free Afro-Americans, and the law in the nineteenth-century American South.
“The South is often considered the source of all social and political ills in this country, steadfast in its inability to change,” says Ogletree. “Being from the South myself, I knew just from living there it is a place where change happens, sometimes in fits and starts and at other times, sweeping in all at once.”
Her own university courses helped Ogletree appreciate the history from a place as multifaceted as the South.
“Through historical research, I was able to transform my anger into an avenue of inquiry. I remember being enthralled by scholarship about slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America,” she say. “I became obsessed with questions of how the slave society of the antebellum United States developed. What rules, formal and informal, undergirded this society? Why were some people of African descent free and the majority were not? What were the conditions of their freedom? How did free Afro-Americans, particularly those living in plantation districts, navigate slave society?”
“I was surprised to find that the most common criminal offenses in the nineteenth-century South were selling liquor without a license and surveyors of the road being indicted for not keeping the roads well-maintained. And I was delighted to find more evidence of the lengths free Black Southerners and their loved ones went to protect their freedom in these records as well.”
Read more at The McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
