In my final post, I
want to end with a plea, or better yet, a pitch. Use local court records, in
your research and your teaching, and if you have the power to do so, help
preserve them. These records are important for the stories they tell and the
voices they feature.
In terms of my own research interests, the extant cases
reveal a previously unknown world of black legal activity. In these records,
you find the story of Milly, an enslaved Mississippi woman who sued a white man
for sizable debts he that owed her. She won, even though she didn’t have the
standing to initiate the suit in the first place. You will also meet
Franchette, a free woman of color who sued Isabella Hawkins (a free black woman
and former slave) three times to recover stolen property. In these lawsuits,
Franchette accused Hawkins of stealing her cows and branding them with the
letters “IH,” and in all three cases the court ordered Hawkins to return the
cattle and pay Franchette damages.
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| Photo by the author |
Hawkins
herself was no stranger to the courtroom, although most often she did the
suing. For instance, in 1834, Hawkins sued Frederick Haydt, a white man, for
stealing her horse and attempting to sell it. The court ordered that Haydt
return the horse. She even successfully sued the local sheriff after he seized
her slave to settle a debt incurred by her former owner. She initiated this
lawsuit against the sheriff only a few short years after her manumission. In
addition, you see hundreds of enslaved people suing slaveholders for their
freedom and claiming ownership over their bodies and their labor. In their suits
for freedom, they also made claims to property they held as slaves and expected
the court to help them safeguard it. They also demanded (and received) back
wages, compensation for their unpaid labor.
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| Photo by the author |
But there are other things you can
see as well. Because these records document the everyday workings of the court
system in local communities, it was ordinary people who used them. Many of them
were poor or living on the margins—people who, unlike wealthy planters, left
few records about their lives behind. Many were illiterate, for instance, so
they didn’t keep diaries or account books. As social historians and scholars of
race and gender have long shown, court records provide some insight into the
lives of those whose voices we may not have otherwise heard. Indeed, in some
cases these are the only records we have that document the lives of non-elites.
You also see married women—black and
white—using the courts to their own advantage. This too might seem surprising,
because in the early 19th century married women in the U.S. lacked a legal
personality. Once they married, they forfeited their legal rights. Yet, they
were present in the local legal record of Mississippi and Louisiana (and
elsewhere), acting at law in their own names and making contracts and suing to
enforce them. They also sued their own husbands for mismanaging their property
or for damages for abuse. In other instances, they sued their husbands for
divorce. Indeed, local court records show married women playing fast and loose with
the doctrine of coverture, ignoring it when convenient and using it when it
benefited them.
You might find interesting anecdotes
to tell your friends or new insults to hurl at your enemies. For instance, you
could tell them about a Mississippi man who was charged with using deception to
obtain a set of false teeth, or a Louisiana man who ran naked through a theater
with ladies present and then stripped off his pants in court while the judge
read the charges against him. Defamation lawsuits are full of great insults:
like one of my favorites, “grasshopper from hell.”
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| Photo by the author |
In
using these records, you might even reach an audience outside of academia. For
instance, right after the publication of my book, a descendant of one of the
formerly enslaved litigants I wrote about emailed me. She found her family
member in my index (his name came up in Google Books in an internet search),
and she contacted me for more information about him and other members of her
extended family. I have also been lucky enough to meet several descendants of
the Belly/Ricard family, a family I discuss in a chapter-long case study at the
end of my book.
In addition, these records make
great teaching tools. I refer to the insights I have gained from reading them
in my lectures, and I make them available to my undergraduate students for use
in our class discussions (in classes that range from women’s and gender history
to legal history to the history of U.S. slavery). I also provide copies for both
undergraduate and graduate students interested in a wide range of research
topics. As I tell my students each time I teach with them, you should work with these types of records not only
because you might enjoy being a voyeur or at least a witness to everyday life,
but also because they demand a particular set of skills. They teach us how to
figure out a complex social landscape and how to think more robustly about
power; and they teach us how organizations work on the ground (rather than how
organizations think they work). In other words, working with
trial court records makes us attentive to what people value and the lengths
they are willing to go to in order to protect those things. Such skills are
valuable to the history major, but also beyond.
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| Photo by the author |
Thanks again to the editors for the invitation to guest blog. Readers, there are copies of representative cases on my website (kimberlywelch.net). And if you have any questions about Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South or want to talk about accessing, using, or preserving local courts records, please get in touch.
