ABSTRACT
This chapter uses Twain's novel to analyze the matrix formed from the competing legal and cultural articulations and disarticulations of race, slavery, and personhood. The nineteenth century in the United States is sometimes described as an era that began in slavery and ended in freedom. The chapter explains that term "matrix" commonly refers to a table used to organize elements and simplify complex equations. William Blackstone saw fictions as a "troublesome, but not dangerous" part of the common law, the means by which the "interior apartments" of a "magnificent and venerable, but useless" "old Gothic castle" are "fitted up for a modern inhabitant". Laws strengthening the connection between race and slavery accrued gradually with regional differences depending on local economic, demographic, and political challenges. Gross's work dismantles the traditional view of nineteenth-century race law as coalescing around biological definitions of race based on blood fractions.
