Stroud's Slave Laws: A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America

Stroud's Slave Laws had extensive influence upon national legal thinking on the issue of slavery. In a blanket survey of slave codes of the period, he analyzed the statutes of twelve slaveholding states. Stroud's book exposed to the world, through its publications in 1827 and 1856, the diabolical nature of legal enactments throughout the South that debased both African people and those who held them in bondage.