Books
BLACK LITIGANTS IN THE ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN SOUTH (University of North Carolina Press, 2018)
Winner:
2019 William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize, American Society for Legal History
2019 J. Willard Hurst Book Prize for best book in socio-legal history, Law and Society Association
2018 David J. Langum Sr. Prize for best book in American Legal History, Langum Charitable Trust
2019 James H. Broussard First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
2019 Chancellor's Award for Research, Vanderbilt University
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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 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 The project investigates unpublished and previously unexplored lower court records from the Natchez district of Mississippi and Louisiana between 1800 and 1860 in which free Blacks and slaves sued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. 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 cattle, land, slaves, and other property, for their freedom and for divorce, and to adjudicate a number of other disagreements. Free Blacks and the enslaved were not strangers to the courts, and 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. |
Articles
“The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans,” Journal of the Civil War Era 12, no. 4 (December 2022): 473-502 (available here)
“Arteries of Capital: William Johnson and the Practice of Black Moneylending in the Antebellum U.S. South,” Slavery & Abolition, 41, no. 2 (May 2020): 304-326 (available here)
“William Johnson’s Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum U.S. South,” Law and History Review, 37, no. 1 (February 2019): 89-124 (available here)
“Black Litigiousness and White Accountability: Free Blacks and the Rhetoric of Reputation in the Antebellum Natchez District,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 5, no. 3 (September 2015): 372-398 (available here)
- Winner:
- Anne Braden Prize for best article in southern women’s history, Southern Historical Association, 2023
- George and Anne Richards Prize for best article published in the 2022 issues of The Journal of the Civil War Era, 2023
“Arteries of Capital: William Johnson and the Practice of Black Moneylending in the Antebellum U.S. South,” Slavery & Abolition, 41, no. 2 (May 2020): 304-326 (available here)
“William Johnson’s Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum U.S. South,” Law and History Review, 37, no. 1 (February 2019): 89-124 (available here)
“Black Litigiousness and White Accountability: Free Blacks and the Rhetoric of Reputation in the Antebellum Natchez District,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 5, no. 3 (September 2015): 372-398 (available here)