A Different Sort of Justice: The Informal Courts of Public Opinion in Antebellum South Carolina (original) (raw)

Law and Society in the South: A History of North Carolina Court Cases

2009

In the Introduction to Law and Society in the South: A History of North Carolina Court Cases, author John W. Wertheimer points out "one of the legal historian's central challenges: how to link law to society-that is, how to describe law and social change in light of each other" (1). In order to accomplish this goal, Law and Society focuses on North Carolina state court cases, rather than federal cases (a more typical focus oflegal scholarship), because of the "proximity of state law to people's lives:' This proximity arises due to states' jurisdiction over "property law, contracts, marriage, divorce, and crime and punishment" and other issues that have "day-today impact" on people's lives (1). This emphasis on day-today lives ofindividuals is central to Wertheimer's book. In fact, Wertheimer asserts, it is just this sort of extralegal study that makes the book unique; he writes that Law and Society "takes an 'external' approach to the study of legal history" in that it "foregrounds the impact of extralegal factors-social, political, and economic-on legal development" (2). He hopes that "the resulting legal history is less about the law in books than about the law as lived in society." For Wertheimer, this legal history fills a scholarly gap; he suggests that his project's "social-history emphasis casts legal disputes in a light

Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History of the South

Journal of Southern History, 1985

When most people consider southern legal history, they think only of slavery and racial segregation and the legal issues that arose from those two phenomena. Few would dispute, however, that the South is a unique, albeit indistinctly defined, 1 region with a social, political, and cultural structure unlike that of any other section of the United States. Thus, it seems reasonable to suppose that the South has a legal tradition of its own as well. Yet, as David J. Bodenhamer 2 and James W. Ely, Jr., 3 the editors of Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History of the South, point out, the legal history of the South has received little attention to date from scholars. 4 Because only one region of the United States-New England-has been the subject of intensive study and research (p. vii), current interpretations of the legal history of the United States are based on an insufficient foundation. As the editors note, the development of a body of literature about the legal history of the South, as well as other regions, would offer "a valuable counterpoint for the understanding of the development of an American legal tradition" (p. vii).

Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South

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 conseque...

Criminal Sentencing in Antebellum America: A North-South Comparison

Historical Social Research, 1990

Scholars often view the 19th-century emphasis on efficient and predictable justice as synonymous with the rise of the commercial-industrial state, and especially with urbanizing areas. An examination of the sentences assigned to white defendants convicted of crimes in two states of the antebellum United States casts doubt on this interpretation. Indiana was a northern, urbanizing, commercial-industrial state; Georgia was southern, rural, and agricultural. Both states operated with similar legal systems and criminal codes, although Georgia assigned sentencing authority to the judge and Indiana to the jury. A comparative analysis of sentences in the two states reveals: (1) Georgia sentences fell into a more narrow and predictable (hence »bureaucratic«) range than did Indiana sentences; (2) Indiana juries displayed no predictability in sentencing; and (3) both states developed »plea bargainings despite the wide discrepancy in sentencing patterns. This latter finding contradicts the traditional view that plea bargains were a late-19th century innovation.

Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South

The Yale Law Journal, 1998

harbored disagreement, suspicion, and conflict-not only over who was black and who was white, but over how to make such determinations at all.' By examining the kinds of evidence witnesses and litigants brought forth at trial, I hope to suggest that law, broadly defined, played an important role in constituting the cultural meaning of racial identities. In this Article, I argue that, over the course of the antebellum period, law made the "performance" of whiteness increasingly important to the determination of racial status. 6 Doing the things a white man or woman did became the law's working definition of what it meant to be white. 7 This 5. Of course, trial records necessarily reveal much more about the racial ideology of the Southern whites than that of people of color, because whites controlled the courts, composed the juries, and gave most of the testimony. It is beyond the scope of this Article to investigate the ideology of "color" of people of color in the 19th century, although I am pursuing this research elsewhere. My preliminary findings based on other records of ex-slaves and free people of color suggest that they exhibited no more agreement than did the white "community" over racial identities. Werner Sollors touches on many issues regarding "mulattoes" and racial identity in his study of "interracial literature" by black authors. See WERNER SOLLORS, NEITHER BLACK NOR