In the antebellum Natchez district, in the heart of slave country, black people sued white people in all-white courtrooms. They sued to enforce the terms of their contracts, recover unpaid debts, recuperate back wages, and claim damages for assault. They sued in conflicts over property and personal status. And they often won. Based on new research conducted in courthouse basements and storage … sheds in rural Mississippi and Louisiana, Kimberly Welch draws on over 1,000 examples of free and enslaved black litigants who used the courts to protect their interests and reconfigure their place in a tense society.
To understand their success, Welch argues that we must understand the language that they used–the language of property, in particular–to make their claims recognizable and persuasive to others and to link their status as owner to the ideal of a free, autonomous citizen. In telling their stories, Welch reveals a previously unknown world of black legal activity, one that is consequential for understanding the long history of race, rights, and civic inclusion in America.
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Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South, Kimberley Welch, 328 pps., University of Cambridge Press (2018).
Reviewed by: Patricia M. Muhammad
Originally published in: 41 Slavery & Abolition:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2020.1752468?journalCode=fsla20&
American southern history encompasses narratives, autobiographies and other historical records documenting white slavers, colonists and plantation owners subjugating Africans and descendant black Americans into the American slavery system. In recent years a few scholars have focused their research on black slaves who instituted freedom suits, that is property rights as it pertains to them as black persons within the slavery system in the courts of St. Louis, Missouri. Yet, Kimberly Welch, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University undertakes a broader approach in her analysis using primary sources from the court archives of Louisiana and Mississippi to introduce the reader to an array of recorded litigation instituted by blacks during the antebellum period. Despite the poor conditions in which these legal pleadings are housed, Welch uncovers a trove of case records that harbors initial complaints filed by black claimants to final judgments and appeals; while other documents provide the researcher a mere glimpse into the dispute between the enumerated parties. Professor Welch balances her analysis within the confines of cultural norms during the antebellum era and what the courts recorded. Welch frames the context of her legal examination under the term ‘property’ both as tangible, non-living possessions and the then legally accepted claim of proprietary interests in another human being. Thus making this text appropriate for those specializing in American legal history, anthropology, black American studies scholars and students, southern American legal and political science.
The author illustrates a surprising dynamic of the presumptively atypical black litigant with her discussion of civil lawsuits ranging from the enslaved suing for freedom based on a manumission promise memorialized in their slavemaster’s will or a free black captured and sold into slavery with the aid of their own family members, who sought legal restoration of their former free status. Blacks sought to exercise a form of civil autonomy within a legal context usually reserved for their white contemporaries. The courtroom was the arena in which black litigants used narrative and legal terms within the bounds of southern cultural norms through court observations and rumor. Black claimants weaved an oral tradition for both spectator and judge, reminiscent of the cultural histiography commonly associated with a part of their attenuated African ancestry. Black plaintiffs obtained representation from primarily white lawyers who made no racial distinction among clientele as the southern courts’ standards regarding ethics were less rigorous during this flexible and inconsistent period of race relations under the system of American slavery. However, the author notes that judges who issued tainted verdicts against black litigants with valid legal claims reflected their inability to fairly adjudicate the cases presented before them despite all evidence in favor of black claimants.
The legal arena, according to Welch, was a form of ‘civic inclusion’ whereby voices ordinarily dismissed now had to be heard when he or she petitioned the local parish court. The author contends it was there where blacks could accuse whites on a temporal equal footing, where neighborhood and white landowners would hear the scandalous tales of their fellow proprietors. Whites’ reputations were susceptible to scrutiny in the courtroom and through local gossip that could easily tarnish the reputation of the accused among their white contemporaries. Thus, whites were held to a legal standard in as much the veracity of the black claimant and his or her witnesses. Other occasions free whites were witnesses for black claimants regardless of blacks’ servile status. This demonstrated the fluidity of race and the cultural association of the black body in the antebellum south compared to perceived freedom and promised equality of the abolitionist North. In contrast of accepted ideals of the ‘white savior’ during the height and popularity of the abolitionist period, the local black populace of the 19th century were facilitators of their own justice using the very legal system which sought to perpetuate their subservience.
Further, the author elucidates how some blacks petitioned the courts to demand the appearance of those who absconded to other states. This is one of the earliest examples in American legal history of a local court utilizing in personam and subject matter jurisdiction to adjudicate civil lawsuits during municipal slavery to the benefit of black litigants. Free and enslaved blacks were creditors to white southern debtors during the 19th century. In the antebellum south, the local population considered debt a vice, a form of slavery. Thus, whites not only subjugated themselves financially, but debt was the nexus of bondage for the white man to the free or enslaved black woman or black man whom the free southerner had borrowed. Accordingly, black creditors were often successful in obtaining judgments in their favor and against the white debtor.
Welch then shares an amazing discovery hidden in the court’s archives in which free blacks also sued whites for theft or conversion of black slaves that free blacks owned in Louisiana. The author illustrates the lack of constancy with civil litigation involving slaves or free blacks. Barely literate slaves were claimants, as were free blacks, slaves were the subject of civil litigation as were free blacks; and blacks were both plaintiff and defendant within the same suit. Blacks appealed to their local courts which remained dominated by whites and they were represented by white attorneys who submitted prayers for relief, often against other whites. Professor Welch aptly demonstrates that race relations during this time was more progressive in Louisiana compared to Mississippi, but in either state blacks still found a way to seek redress for wrongs whites committed against whether they were victorious with their cases or not.