Skip to content Skip to navigation
Summary: This module explores the relationship between slavery and the law in the antebellum South, exploring how courts dealt with criminal offenses by parties who were simultaneously considered people and property.
During the antebellum era, slaves occupied the “double character,” of being simultaneously considered human beings and property. This position often caused difficulty and confusion when slaves interacted with the court system, as the courts generally treated slaves as persons when tried for criminal offenses, and as property during civil trials.1 This module highlights a document that offers a window into the somewhat contradictory nature of enslaved people’s interactions with the legal system.
In Texas, the state legislature began developing legal regulations for the conduct of the enslaved in 1837, when they established that “insurrection, poisoning, rape of a white female, assault on a white man with intent to kill, maiming a white person, arson, murder and burglary,” would be considered capital offenses.2 As the legislature further defined penalties for criminal conduct undertaken by the enslaved, death and whipping emerged as the only punishments enslaved people convicted of crimes could receive. While some slaves accused of violent offenses against whites were dealt with by vigilante justice and “lynch law” before they could receive trials in district courts, trials of the enslaved often proceeded with remarkably close attention to official procedure, despite strong presumptions of guilt.
Judge Peter W. Gray’s instructions to the jury [http://hdl.handle.net/1911/62257] before deliberation during the 1855 trial of Nathan, a slave living in Houston – one item in Gray’s personal papers housed at the Woodson Research Center [http://library.rice.edu/collections/WRC/finding-aids/manuscripts/0417] – highlights the difficulty in dealing with the enslaved as both persons and property, as well as this adherence to procedure. The State of Texas accused Nathan of murdering George Thomason, a white man. Despite Nathan’s enslaved status, however, Judge Gray instructed the jury that “[t]he prisoner though a slave is entitled by law to the same fair and impartial trial as if he were a white citizen and the same rules of evidence and principles of law are to be applied to the consideration and decision of this case as to that of any other person.” Judge Gray continued, further instructing the jury that “[i]f from the evidence you are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused did kill George Thomason…then you will find him ‘guilty,’ but if not satisfied of this beyond a reasonable doubt then Not Guilty.”3
 |
This concern for the procedural rights of slaves involved in serious criminal trials does not seem to be an aberration from the norms of the Texas court system. Randolph B. Campbell utilized very similar sources in his discussion of Texas’ slave laws. In one instance, a judge instructed a trial jury in 1861, when a slave named Dave attempted (but failed) to murder a white man, that standard procedure should be followed. In regards to the evidence, the judge commanded the jury that “[i]f you have a reasonable doubt of his guilt, he is entitled to the benefit of such doubt and to an acquittal.”4 One enslaved man was acquitted of murdering a fellow slave in 1846 simply because the trial jury had not been properly sworn in. Similarly, an enslaved man from Rusk County named Calvin, after being found guilty of a capital offense, had the conviction overturned because the indictment had been amended mid-trial. The Justice stated that the case, and the procedure that should be followed, “is precisely the same as if the accused were a free white man, and we cannot strain the law ‘in the estimation of a hair,’ because the defendant is a slave.”5
In the case addressed in this document, in addition to some cases cited by Campbell, judges also requested that the juries determine if the owners of the accused slaves had attempted to assist the slave in evading the law or prosecution, in an effort to maintain their property. When a jury found a slave guilty of a capital offense in Texas, they also assessed the value of that slave, half of which was then paid out to the slave’s owner. Slave owners would receive nothing, however, if their a jury found their slave guilty and that his or her master had attempted to assist the slave in avoiding trial.
In many cases involving enslaved defendants, despite explicit instructions for the jury to adhere to the same procedure as they would for a white defendant in any other case, juries frequently returned with 'guilty' verdicts and death sentences, as was the case for Nathan. Glenn McNair addresses this aspect of slave trials in his book Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System. He notes that although most southern courts afforded blacks most of the same procedural rights as whites by the 1850’s, “this similarity in procedural rights did not…produce racially equitable results. Courts charged and convicted blacks at a much higher rate than whites accused of the same crimes.”6 Given McNair’s findings – not to mention Judge Gray’s participation in the Secession Convention and friendship with Jefferson Davis – it’s clear that judges and juries did not pay close attention to legal procedure during the criminal trials of the enslaved because of a belief in racial equality.
A significant degree of debate still exists among historians as to why the enslaved received such seemingly equitable treatment, at least procedurally, when dealing with the legal system. Thomas D. Morris argued in Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860, that after 1850 southerners turned to the court systems in an effort to regulate slavery, while Christopher Waldrep pointed out in Roots of Disorder that it was almost always in slave-owners best interests to keep their slaves out of the court system for fear of losing valuable property.7 H. Robert Baker questions whether slave owners’ increasing reliance on the legal system for slave discipline perhaps reveals a crisis in the authority of planters over the enslaved in the final decade before the Civil War.8
This transcription of Judge Gray’s jury instructions, though it does not in itself provide an answer to the cultural or the legal significance of the adherence to standard protocol found in criminal trials of the enslaved during the late antebellum period, does offer an important glimpse into the courtroom. Though the document’s explanatory power is rather minor when considered alone, when interpreted in conjunction with other documents that discuss slavery, race, or the law – some of which can also be found in Woodson Research Center [http://library.rice.edu/collections/WRC/finding-aids/manuscripts/u.s.-civil-war-slavery-general-subjects] – researchers can gain significant insight into the character and culture of slavery and the law in Texas, as well as the wider South.
__________________________________________________________
Resources:
Seglie, AnaMaria. "Slavery in the Americas." Connexions. July 18, 2011. http://cnx.org/content/col11314/1.3/.
Slavery and U.S. Civil War collections at the Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University: http://library.rice.edu/collections/WRC/finding-aids/manuscripts/u.s.-civil-war-slavery-general-subjects
More about this module: Metadata | Downloads | Version History
This work is licensed by John Marks under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by John Marks on Aug 10, 2011 2:15 pm -0500.
