Poor Whites, Benevolent Masters, and the Ideologies of Slavery: A Slave Accused of Rape in the Antebellum South

This Article analyzes in detail a case involving a slave accused of raping a white woman in the 1850s to offer a fresh perspective on our basic assumptions about sex and race in the slave South. Joining a new group of “cultural-legal historians,” the author looks beyond the legal language of Southern legislatures and high courts, and focuses instead on the trial record of one case: State v. Pleasant. In doing so, the author uncovers the stories of ordinary men and women – the slave, his master, his accuser, his attorney, the jurors, and others – to see how the laws and attitudes governing sex, race, and slavery affected everyday lives. The approach adds both specificity and complexity to the debate over how the socio-legal regime responded to black-white relationships. Ultimately, the author concludes that an accusation of interracial rape did not produce the hysteria that traditional thought presumes. Demands for retributive justice were tempered by the interests of the master and his slaveholding neighbors, and by Southern notions about the honor and character of white men, white women, and black slaves

Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South

Kimberly Welch has written a superb book. In Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South, Welch invites her reader into the local courtrooms in the Natchez district of Mississippi and Louisiana to witness a version of the slave South that, until recently, few historians had bothered to tell, or perhaps had even imagined. It is a version that shows persons of color—free and enslaved—as litigators, as people using the law to actively protect their interests and shape their own destinies

Litigating Slavery’s Reach: A Story of Race, Rights, and the Law During the California Gold Rush

In May 1852, Charles Perkins decided he wanted his slaves back. Born in Mississippi, Charles emigrated to California in 1849 during the height of the Gold Rush. When he came, like hundreds of others from Southern states, he also brought three enslaved men with him. Following California’s admission to the Union as a free state, however, Charles purportedly freed the men and then returned home, alone. Then, a year later, Charles had a change of heart. Following the enactment of the California Fugitive Slave Act in 1852—which declared that slaves brought to California before it became a state were still slaves—Charles brought suit in a California court to reclaim what he considered to be his property. The resulting litigation animated the state and the country, as the parties debated the Act’s constitutionality and the larger issue of whether slavery could exist on free soil. The answer, provided five years before Dred Scott, firmly planted the West in the middle of the national debate over race, slavery, and the law. This Article is a narrative history of In re Perkins, the case involving Charles Perkins and the three men he maintained were his slaves. It takes place during the Gold Rush and the immediate years that followed, and it has two primary goals. First, by centering a story about slavery in the Far West, it provides a critical lens through which we can explore how the ideological conflicts animating the North-South axis also extended horizontally to the Pacific Ocean, thereby bringing the West into the national discourse over slavery and the growing sectional crisis. Second, as a narrative history, this Article affords an opportunity to dig deep into the main participants in the case and reconsider who we think are the makers and interpreters of the law. Drawing on local court records and personal papers, this Article is part of a larger story of how people of color and their allies shaped and reshaped the law in far more ways than previously imagined