Date of Award
Spring 5-1-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Mark Miller
Second Advisor
Sarah Chinn
Academic Program Adviser
Mark Miller
Abstract
This thesis elaborates “voluntary slavery” as a problem for thought for both proslavery legalists and literary writers in the antebellum period. It takes as its point of departure the passage of Southern laws throughout the 1850s that provided free Black persons the option to petition for self-enslavement to a master/mistress of their choice, and the safeguards within them that led a significant number of such petitions to be rejected. Given the political tensions of the 1850s, why would legal practitioners actively impede the option of self-enslavement? Implicit in these rejections is the possibility that self-enslavement was in some way a threat to Slaveocratic legitimacy. To elaborate this seemingly paradoxical premise, this thesis connects it to a longer intellectual history of classical and Enlightenment thinkers for whom self-sale, as the disposal and “optionalization” of freedom, was either illegal or outright impossible. Each chapter pairs a close reading of an antebellum literary text with a different point in this genealogy in order to shed light on the motivations and fantasies of Southern legal practices. By elaborating “voluntary slavery” across a number of texts and thinkers—from Luis de Molina and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Herman Melville and Harriet Jacobs—this thesis demonstrates how the imperative and idealization of "freedom" was central to legal anxieties around self-enslavement as well as to antebellum proslavery ideology as a whole.
Recommended Citation
Pham, Vinh T., "Optional Freedom: The Idea of Voluntary Slavery in Antebellum Law and Literature" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1543
