Many thanks to the
editors for inviting me to guest blog about my new book, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South. Over the next few
weeks, I will be sharing stories about the research I conducted and the
challenges of not only finding that material but also interpreting it. I will
also discuss a few emblematic individuals and their cases, as well as what I
see as the significance of those cases. And I will make a plea for local court
records—for their preservation, but also their importance in our research and
teaching. I begin today, however, with a description of the book.
This
book is a historical study of free and enslaved African Americans’ use of the
local courts in the antebellum American South. Specifically, I investigate
unpublished and largely unexplored lower court records from the Natchez
district of Mississippi and Louisiana between 1800 and 1860 in which free black
and enslaved litigants sued whites and other African Americans. This is a study
of private law claims. Black plaintiffs in civil suits remain a little known
aspect of the legal history of the slave South.
For those readers less familiar with this area
of the Deep South, the Natchez district is the plantation region along the
Mississippi River (roughly) between Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge,
Louisiana. By the early nineteenth century, the cotton counties of western
Mississippi and the cotton and sugar parishes of eastern Louisiana were
emphatically slave societies: the region’s economy depended on slavery, and
slaveholders’ interests dominated politics. Natchez, Mississippi, was home to
“Forks-of-the-Road,” one of the antebellum South’s busiest slave markets. By
the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the district’s slaveholders
represented some of the largest importers of slaves in the booming domestic
slave trade, and they were among the richest men in the nation.
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| Map courtesy of Danielle Picard |
Slavery influenced every aspect of life in the
Natchez district, from the realities of everyday domination to its elaboration
in the black codes of the period. Lawmakers in Mississippi and Louisiana
designed legislation to maintain the institution of slavery and ensure that
people of African descent enjoyed few legal rights. These laws turned people
into property, denied them civil and political rights, and subjected them to
harsh criminal punishments. In addition, both states limited free black
people's ability to seek redress in court. They also burdened them with onerous
administrative and registration requirements that affected their everyday
lives.
Despite the restrictions they faced and the
humiliations imposed upon them, my research shows that black Americans found
some legal redress for wrongs done to them and debts owed to them. Trial court
records remind us that people of African descent were not just objects of law;
they were wielders of it. Free blacks and slaves resided at the center of
antebellum southern legal culture—as objects of regulation and punishment,
certainly, and as active protectors
of their own interests.
So
how do we know this?
We
know about this primarily through the extensive documentation produced by the
civil courts in the Natchez district—in particular, the trial court records
from Iberville and Pointe Coupee parishes in Louisiana and Adams and Claiborne
counties in Mississippi. I chose these four counties because of their
centrality to the region and their location along the Mississippi River, but
also because the trial court records from this time period still exist in these
locations. This is unusual. Many
southern courthouses burned to the ground during the Civil War or experienced
floods that destroyed the early records. In other counties in the region, I
found that court employees sometimes threw away or burned old records because
of the lack of storage space. Even in the four places that I selected for my
research, the extant records are in danger of disappearing. (I’ll be discussing
the records themselves—as well as my research process—in a future post).
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| Photo by the author |
After
digging through all the extant lower court records (often held in basements and
storage sheds) from these four counties, I found over 1,000 trial court cases
involving black litigants using law on their own behalf. They sued whites and
other people of color to enforce the terms of their contracts, recover unpaid
debts, recuperate back wages, and claim damages for assault. They sued in
conflicts over cattle, land, slaves, and other property, for their freedom and
for divorce, and to resolve a number of other disagreements. In addition, free
people of color used the courts to register their marriages, probate their
wills, donate their property to their children or wives, emancipate their
family members, and request official family meetings dedicated to allocating
resources. Enslaved men and women engaged their owners in courtroom battles
over personal status and freedom and the status and freedom of their children
and kin. And sometimes, in a few rare instances, slaves took whites to court to
recover unpaid debts for money they had loaned them.
This kind of presence is unexpected. We have
long viewed the southern courts as institutions that rigidly enforced racial
hierarchies and protected the property interests of white slaveholders. That
said, while it is certainly important to recognize the presence of black
litigants in antebellum southern courtrooms, it is perhaps more important to
unpack the significance of such litigation. Thus, this is not simply a story of
the fact of black litigiousness. Rather,
it is also a story of the meaning of
black litigiousness.
The book focuses much of its attention on claims
to legal personhood and civic inclusion. These were claims about who had access
to the power of law, certainly, but they were also claims about who counts. These were claims to
inclusion and membership. Indeed, for black litigants civic inclusion had a
participatory function, one that involved the capacity to act as an independent
person at law and participate in the public sphere; but civic inclusion also
had a symbolic function: the recognition that this person was worthy of staking
a claim.
Litigation, then, represents a moment in which
white judges, juries, defendants, witnesses, and audiences in the gallery were
forced to confront and recognize the claims of those they believed were
intrinsically inferior. This book, at
its core, is an attempt to explore the consequences of that recognition.
