The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Mondays at Beinecke program presents Evan Turiano, 2023-2024 Walter O. Evans Fellow for the Study of Slavery or Race at Yale:
“The Politics of “Fugitive Slave Rendition” and the Coming of the American Civil War.”
Evan Turiano received his Ph.D. in History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2022. His work has appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era and has been supported by the New York Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, and the University of Virginia’s Nau Center for Civil War History. At the Beinecke, he is conducting research for his first book, which will appear with the Louisiana State University Press.
Drawing from political history, legal theory, and the study of enslaved resistance, his project seeks to uncover the conflict surrounding the contested legal rights of people accused of being fugitive slaves and argues that their activism fueled antislavery politics in the United States. African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves asserted that due process rights were critical in their struggle against kidnapping. These claims spurred political fights about African Americans’ citizenship rights in the federal system. Slaveholders, on the other hand, claimed that any recognition of Black legal rights in the United States threatened the comprehensive property right that formed the backbone of their economic domination. My book manuscript tells the story of how that conflict, over eight decades, paved the road to the Civil War and the destruction of United States slavery.