Bondage Compounded (21 July 2026)

[LLM Report]

The legal, economic, and philosophical genesis of chattel slavery in British North America, alongside its subsequent codification within the constitutional framework of the United States, represents one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds in modern legal historiography. For generations, an idealized, neo-Whig narrative dominated the American academy. This perspective framed early American slavery as a localized, tragic aberration—a provincial anomaly that the Founders reluctantly tolerated within a broader, liberty-loving Anglo-American legal tradition. In this view, the common law was inherently pure, the imperial center was largely indifferent, and the ultimate consolidation of human bondage was an accidental byproduct of frontier pragmatism and southern geographic determinism.