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.

Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South

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.

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.

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.