Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, YEAR. / Title from screen (viewed on August 26, 2009). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Jane E. Schultz, Jonathan R. Eller, Robert Rebein. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-83).

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis examines Mark Twain’s use of the dialectic between the characters Huck and Jim to illuminate Jim’s humanity in the classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Over the course of their adventure, Huck learns that Jim is a human being and not property. This realization leads Huck to choose to assist Jim in his escape from captivity, and risk eternal damnation according to his religious beliefs. Huck’s decision is driven by the friendship that develops between him and his fellow fugitive on their adventure. Jim’s kindness and stewardship also provide a stark contrast to the treachery of the characters on the banks of the river. Twain thus crafts a message that slavery and race discrimination are wrong without taking the tone of an abolitionist, combining an amusing children’s story with a profound social message. Although definitive proof of his intention to do so has never been found, human friendship is the sliver of common ground Twain used to reach across the profound racial gap in the United States in the late 19th century. The analysis takes place in four parts: (1) a comparison of AHF to other nineteenth century works that featured slavery to establish it as unique among those works; (2) an analysis of the aforementioned dialectic from a modern text of the novel featuring previous deleted parts from the early manuscript; (3) a review of the critical response to the novel which reveals that if Twain was trying to send a message of racial equality, he was not doing so overtly; and (4) a conclusion in which I posit that Twain found a creative solution to a social problem and cite critical discourse that notes Twain’s course of action. This yielded a work that was both more widely read and timeless than a work that confronted slavery directly. Chapters one, three and four utilize critical dialogue and history from print and digital sources. Jane E. Schultz, Ph.D., Professor

This thesis clarifies recent debates on the problems of territorialized freedom in the Atlantic world by examining several extradition cases involving runaway slaves in Canada, where southern slaveholders attempted to retrieve their lost property by relabeling fugitive slaves as fugitive criminals. In order to combat these efforts and receive the full protections of British subjecthood, self-emancipated people realized that they needed to prove themselves worthy of this status. To achieve this, black refugees formulated their own language of subjecthood predicated upon economic productivity, social respectability, and political loyalty. By actively working to incorporate themselves into the British Empire, Afro-Canadians redefined subjecthood from a status largely seen as a passively received birthright to a deliberate choice. Therefore, this thesis demonstrates that ways in which formerly enslaved people laid out their own terms for imperial inclusion and defined the contours of black social and legal belonging in a partially free Atlantic world. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis examines how the law dealt with international fugitives. It focuses on formal extradition and the cross-border abduction of wanted criminals by police officers and other state officials. Debates over extradition and abduction reflected important issues of state power and civil liberty, and were shaped by currents of thought circulating throughout the imperial, Atlantic, and common law worlds. Debates over extradition involved questioning the very basis of international law. They also raised difficult questions about civil liberties and human rights. Throughout this period escaped American slaves and other groups made claims for what we would now call refugee status, and argued that their surrender violated codes of law and ideas of justice that transcended the colonies and even the wider British Empire. Such claims sparked a decades-long debate in North America and Europe over how to codify refugee protections. Ultimately, Britain used its imperial power to force Canada to accept such safeguards. Yet even as the formal extradition system developed, an informal system of police abductions operated in the Canadian-American borderlands. This system defied formal law, but it also manifested sophisticated local ideas about community justice and transnational legal order. This thesis argues that extradition and abduction must be understood within three overlapping contexts. The first is the ethos of liberal transnationalism that permeated all levels of state officials in British North America/Canada. This view largely prioritised the erosion of domestic barriers to international cooperation over the protection of individual liberty. It was predicated in large part on the idea of a common North American civilization. The second context is Canada’s place in the British Empire. Extradition and abduction highlight both how British North America/Canada often expounded views on legal order radically different from Britain, but also that even after Confederation in 1867 the empire retained real power to shape Canadian policy. The final context is international law and international legal order. Both extradition and abduction were aspects of law on an international and transnational level. As a result, this thesis examines the processes of migration, adoption, and adaptation of international law.

This thesis examines how the law dealt with international fugitives. It focuses on formal extradition and the cross-border abduction of wanted criminals by police officers and other state officials. Debates over extradition and abduction reflected important issues of state power and civil liberty, and were shaped by currents of thought circulating throughout the imperial, Atlantic, and common law worlds. Debates over extradition involved questioning the very basis of international law. They also raised difficult questions about civil liberties and human rights. Throughout this period escaped American slaves and other groups made claims for what we would now call refugee status, and argued that their surrender violated codes of law and ideas of justice that transcended the colonies and even the wider British Empire. Such claims sparked a decades-long debate in North America and Europe over how to codify refugee protections. Ultimately, Britain used its imperial power to force Canada to accept such safeguards. Yet even as the formal extradition system developed, an informal system of police abductions operated in the Canadian-American borderlands. This system defied formal law, but it also manifested sophisticated local ideas about community justice and transnational legal order. This thesis argues that extradition and abduction must be understood within three overlapping contexts. The first is the ethos of liberal transnationalism that permeated all levels of state officials in British North America/Canada. This view largely prioritised the erosion of domestic barriers to international cooperation over the protection of individual liberty. It was predicated in large part on the idea of a common North American civilization. The second context is Canada’s place in the British Empire. Extradition and abduction highlight both how British North America/Canada often expounded views on legal order radically different from Britain, but also that even after Confederation in 1867 the empire retained real power to shape Canadian policy. The final context is international law and international legal order. Both extradition and abduction were aspects of law on an international and transnational level. As a result, this thesis examines the processes of migration, adoption, and adaptation of international law.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves. The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.