Advocacy

This chapter turns away from the linguistic strategies people of color mobilized in court to investigate white lawyers’ incentives to represent black litigants and white judges’ motivations when deciding cases involving African Americans’ claims. It assesses the role of white people in the story of black litigiousness. Of course, rhetoric remained important, but rhetoric rarely led to results without a particular institutional makeup. Understanding the institutional framework of the Natchez district bench and bar—in this case, the makeup of the legal professionals, the internal hierarchies and values, the incentive patterns, and the pressure points and tensions—provides insight into how and where marginalized peoples inserted themselves and under what circumstances.

Introduction

Black plaintiffs in civil suits remain a little known aspect of the legal history of the slave South. African Americans were not only observers of trials, informal participants, defendants, or objects of regulation: trial court records reveal them to be prolific litigators as well. They were parties to civil suits in their own interests and directly active in legal proceedings. They sued other black people, certainly, but they also sued white people. What is more, 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. The black legal experience in America cannot be reduced to white regulation and black criminality. Examining African Americans’ involvement in private law reveals a different picture. Black people appealed to the courts to protect their interests. They exploited the language of rights and property, thus including themselves within an American narrative of citizenship and privilege in advance of formal emancipation. When black litigants made such claims at law, they expected the courts to validate and execute those claims. Indeed, they sought accountability. Thus, seemingly mundane civil actions like debt recovery suits complicate our notions about the sources of rights and their relationship to civic inclusion.

For Family and Property

When using the courts to protect their family, people of color relied on and deployed a well-used model for litigation and claims-making—a model set by fellow black litigants. This model included several tactics for appealing to the bar: they exploited the language of property and law, rhetoric that was recognizable to their audiences and thus usable and effective. They found ways to make others accountable to them: with their stories and reputations and through their networks. They bound people in relationships of obligation to them—bonds that sometimes upended the southern racial hierarchy. They used property ownership and its associated presumptions about independence and reliability to make their claims and to legitimize and safeguard their families. In so doing, they served as their own advocates, registered their voices in an official, public forum, and laid claim to civic inclusion. This chapter examines how well the model worked. It follows the formation of one family from Iberville Parish, the Belly family, and their efforts to form a family before the law and through property ownership.

The Sanctity of Property

This chapter examines lawsuits over property. Free blacks went to court with full knowledge of their rights to property, and they expected the courts to deal with them fairly and protect those rights, just as they would with white southerners. They sued whites and other people of color in disputes over real and personal property. They also appealed to the courts to protect the dignity of their labor and sued to protect labor contracts or recover back wages. Like many antebellum Americans, free people of color viewed their labor as a form of property; it too represented a path to economic independence. Property ownership, however, sometimes rendered free people of color vulnerable to the greed of unscrupulous individuals. Free blacks’ precarious position in a social order dedicated to white supremacy sometimes meant they were the victims of fraud—or worse. When cheated, they appealed to the courts to intervene. This chapter focuses its attention primarily on the property disputes of free people of color, as the southern legal apparatus did not acknowledge or protect the slaves’ economy, but on occasion even those held as property went to court and sued.

Afterword

This chapter examines Josephine Decuir, the first plaintiff in a constitutional case on racial discrimination in public transit to appear before the U.S Supreme Court. It demonstrates that in her lawsuit she drew on a rich tradition of black legal advocacy, lessons she learned from her family and from black litigants throughout the Natchez district. It argues that black litigants’ pre-emancipation experience with private law was important, for it was preparation for the long battle ahead for full citizenship and equality, a battle that would continue to be (and continues to be) fought over in the nation’s courts and beyond. Civil litigation—seemingly mundane lawsuits over property disputes, for divorce, or to recover unpaid loans—is also a significant component of the civil rights and racial justice struggle. For these lawsuits involve claims about who counts, whose voices are worth hearing, and who can and should be included. They are claims on the state and claims to accountability and recognition. They are claims about the protection of human dignity.

Subjects of Selfhood

This chapter examines 128 cases of enslaved people suing for their freedom (lawsuits that recognized or altered the personal status of an individual held in a state of slavery). Enslaved people in the Natchez district exploited narrow escape hatches within the legal system in order to orchestrate a change in personal status and claim freedom for themselves and their families—often successfully—despite legal restrictions to manumission that increased over time. If they could prove that defendants illegally held them as slaves, they won their lawsuits more often than not. Enslaved litigants sued for their freedom on a number of grounds, from the enforcement of promises of freedom made in their late masters' wills to accusations of kidnapping to safeguarding self-purchase contracts. They employed their knowledge of the law and legal processes and harnessed their considerable community networks—both local and distant—in order to gain their liberty. Enslaved litigants used every available opening in the law when pressing for freedom and transformed abstract privileges and obligations into social and legal realities. By claiming their rights to themselves and their labor, moreover, enslaved people induced the Mississippi and Louisiana courts to act against the economic interests of a slaveholders' republic.

The Rhetoric of Reputation

This chapter demonstrates that one of the main rhetorical tactics exploited by black litigants in the antebellum Natchez district was to leverage the cultural scripts of reputation in court proceedings. African Americans strategically deployed the language of reputation to gain a measure of autonomy over their lives. On certain occasions, such language could not only bolster their credibility, it could even curtail white authority. For black litigants, a reputation was not just a thing that one had; it was also a malleable package of linguistic possibilities one claimed or manipulated. An individual’s reputation symbolized the community’s assessment and opinion about that person, certainly; but it also entailed a language that one could leverage or deploy.

Telling Stories

This chapter examines how black litigants in the antebellum U.S. South learned to tell legal stories. It follows three cases in which litigants mediated and navigated slavery and its attendant concepts about race through contested narratives told in legal settings. The exploration of how black litigants seized upon narrative structures, how they constructed competing narratives, and how opponents challenged the meanings of those stories illuminates a far more complex legal culture of slavery than any straightforward story of domination and subordination.

Your Word Is Your Bond

Debt actions represented one the most common types of lawsuits people of color initiated. Black moneylenders were regular participants in the credit economy of the slave South. Free people of color, in particular, repeatedly extended loans in various amounts to both white and black people. When the sums went unpaid, free black creditors sued borrowers to recoup the money owed. In the Natchez district, a world in which blackness symbolized dependency and whiteness independence, white debtors were bound to black creditors. The legal mechanisms involving debt collection favored lenders—even when those lenders were black. Under such circumstances, the courts could serve as a place where the social and racial relations of a slave society were temporarily suspended, insofar as their suspension furthered the goal of preserving private property. This chapter examines debt recovery from its inception (the loan) to its discharge (whether through payment or execution). The process itself was loaded with symbolic weight, for in the antebellum South, it invoked a set of highly charged ideas about virtue, ethics, membership, and race.