For an interview with me on this project (and with representative images), see the Newberry Magazine (Spring 2015).
Click here (interview begins on page 11): Newberry Magazine.
Click here (interview begins on page 11): Newberry Magazine.
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In the antebellum American South, among the sprawling plantations of the Natchez district, in a society in which slavery was deeply entrenched and violently defended, black people sued white people. They often won. This is a phenomenon that has largely been overlooked by historians. But it ought not to be, because it speaks to the heart of the ways in which we understand the operation of power, of law, and of racial hierarchies in the slave South.
Black Litigants is a historical study of free and enslaved African Americans’ use of the local courts in the antebellum American South. The project investigates unpublished and previously unexplored lower court records from the Natchez district of Mississippi and Louisiana between 1800 and 1860 in which free blacks and slaves sued whites and other African Americans. My research includes over 1,000 examples of black litigants using the courts on their own behalf—often successfully. African Americans 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 adjudicate a number of other disagreements. Although they present technical and interpretive challenges, local court records represent an important resource for understanding the relationship between legal systems and formally marginalized peoples in racially and economically stratified societies. In this case they undermine the longstanding assumption that African Americans were legal outsiders. Free blacks and slaves were not strangers to the courts. They resided at the center of antebellum southern legal culture—as the objects of white concerns about social control and racial hierarchy and as active protectors of their own interests. Their litigation indicates that the legal system was not solely the province of the elite. On significant occasions it could serve it as a tool of the subordinated, even in a slave society. Trial court cases from Iberville and Pointe Coupee parishes in Louisiana and Adams and Claiborne counties in Mississippi between 1800 and 1860 represent the bulk of the research materials for this project. These records are neither published nor housed in any traditional archive. Instead, they are in the possession of the clerks of the courts’ offices and have not been preserved, processed, cleaned, or even organized. Frequently, the records are in unlabeled boxes in basements and in sloppy piles sitting unprotected from vermin and weather in wet storage sheds on the outskirts of southern towns. Due to state and county budget shortfalls and neglect, these records are in danger of disappearing from history forever. (See Images for representative photographs). Parts of Chapter 2 were first published in 2015 in the Journal of the Civil War Era. Available here: "Black Litigiousness and White Accountability: Free Blacks and the Rhetoric of Reputation in the Antebellum Natchez District." |
Principal Investigator
Variation in Use of Courts by Legal Status and Jurisdiction
National Science Foundation
Division of Social and Economic Sciences
Continuing Grant 2014-2017 (estimated)
$149,605
Abstract
Variation in Use of Courts by Legal Status and Jurisdiction
National Science Foundation
Division of Social and Economic Sciences
Continuing Grant 2014-2017 (estimated)
$149,605
Abstract
"This project will test the significance of both legal status and jurisdiction in making claims in the courts, comparing across common-law and civil-law regimes. Civil law jurisdictions organize legal claims making differently from common law systems. People who took cases to court varied by legal status. That variation will allow the project to evaluate the significance of legal status in making legal claims, both in process and outcomes. Litigation indicates that the legal system was not solely the province of the elite. Reimagining members of subordinated groups as shrewd litigators will complicate our interpretation of power and will serve as a model for understanding the legal action of other subordinated groups."
"The Black Atlantic Economy"
While researching my first book project, I realized that debt actions represented one of the most common types of lawsuits initiated by black plaintiffs in the pre-Civil War Deep South. Moreover, black plaintiffs almost always won, regardless of the race of the defendant. Of the extant cases from the Natchez district, for instance, African Americans lost two cases between 1800 and 1860, and two-thirds of these involved a white defendant. At least ninety black men and women in the region served as creditors. People of color were indeed more than property and labor in the economy of the cotton South; they were also essential arteries for capital, extending large and small loans to both white and other black people. Thus, my second book project (tentatively titled "The Black Atlantic Economy") examines African Americans' involvement in the nineteenth-century credit economy of the Atlantic World (spanning from the Lower Mississippi Valley, to Charleston, S.C., to Paris, France, and back again).
"Mapping the Other Underground Railroad"
I am also at work on a third project, one that combines my interests in law and slavery in the nineteenth-century, on one hand, and digital history and the preservation of fragile documents, on the other hand. This digital humanities project, titled, "Mapping the Other Underground Railroad," traces human trafficking and kidnapping rings in the antebellum United States. It draws on kidnapped black people's lawsuits for freedom from Natchez, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana—free people abducted in northern states and sold as slaves in the Deep South. The project will use these lawsuits toward two ends: first, to map the trafficking networks the abductors used to move free people of color through the domestic slave trade and into enslavement in the Deep South; and second, to map the networks—both local and distant—that the abducted drew on in their lawsuits. By geocoding data from trial records, the project will enable a spatial analysis of the neighborhoods through which kidnapped people of color moved, and it will make visible the interpersonal, regional, legal, and commercial networks they leveraged. To support this project, I received a Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Digital Humanities for the 2017-18 academic year from Vanderbilt University.
