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Vol. 26:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 1998
Race, Slavery and Free Blacks: Petitions to Southern Legislatures and County Courts, 1776-1867: A Documentary History
by Loren Schweninger
Established at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991 with a grant from the NHPRC, the Race and Slavery Petitions Project is designed to locate, collect, organize, and publish virtually all extant relevant legislative petitions, and a representative sample of county court petitions from the 15 Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) and the District of Columbia. The time frame is from 1776 to 1867, from the beginning of state governments to the end of slavery. With the establishment of state governments, the number of petitions concerning race and slavery rose dramatically, and while slavery ended in 1865, cases continued to appear in the equity courts over the next few years.
Between 1991 and 1994, the editor and director journeyed to 14 state archives and 175 county court houses to collect and photocopy or microfilm relevant petitions. In a total of 540 research travel days during this three-year stint, the editor collected approximately 17,000 petitions, and with related documents (writs, oaths, depositions, answers, decrees, legislative reports, court appeals, recommendations [called "certificates"], correspondence, and others) approximately 120,000 pages of documentary evidence.
The project, supported by the NHPRC, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, will produce a two-series microfilm edition of all extant legislative petitions (approximately 2,975 in microfilm series 1), and a representative sample of county court petitions (approximately 14,000 in microfilm series 2). It will also produce a two-volume book edition of approximately 200 legislative and 200 county court petitions.
In recent years, scholars have produced extensive literature on race and slavery in the South. To a remarkable degree, this scholarship has relied either on slave reminiscences, slave narratives, slave autobiographies, or on plantation records, planters' journals, and the testimony of prominent whites. Even the recent interest in women's history has uncovered diaries of elite white women, or produced monographs about black women, based heavily on recollections.
The petitions with which this project deals not only supplement available resources, but create a much more detailed picture of African Americans seeking their legal rights at local and state levels. The beginning of this process virtually coincides with the creation of state governments at the behest of the Continental Congress in 1776. The process continues through the years prior to the Civil War, finally merging with legal actions arising from legislation passed by Congress to protect the rights of African Americans in post-Civil War America. By their very nature, these records reveal new dimensions of the African American experience.
Legislative Petitions
Written on a wide range of topics - manumission, colonization, religion, laws governing slaves, racial mixing, black military service - by a wide range of Southerners - slaveholders and non-slaveholders, blacks and whites, men and women, slaves and freemen - legislative petitions reveal the brutal nature of slavery, the fears of whites living in areas of large concentrations of blacks, and the workings of a legal system designed to control African Americans. They also tell of slaves' yearnings for freedom, the attitudes of free blacks toward the South, and the efforts of free persons of color to overcome restrictive laws. They bring to light slave women who lived with their owners, mulatto children who were rejected by their white fathers, and black men who had liaisons with white women. Indeed, they provide fascinating insights into virtually every aspect of Southern life - political, legal, economic, social, and cultural.
County Court Petitions
A large portion of county court petitions, probably about half, deal with estate distribution or administration among slaveholding families. Some of these documents are perfunctory, but others reveal family disputes, charges of fraud or improper conduct, and disagreements among heirs about how and when slaves should be put on the auction block. In addition, they sometimes contain, either in the body of the petition or in an appendix, copies of wills, inventories, slave hiring contracts, debt payment records, and reports by estate administrators, hiring agents, or court-appointed commissioners. It is here that the rich documentary evidence concerning children who owned slaves and their guardians can be found, complete with annual reports on slaves who were hired out, the profits that accrued to their masters, and their appraised value. The most mechanical reports sometimes yield surprising data, such as when Bourbon County, Kentucky, slaveholder Polly White petitioned the circuit court to sell a black woman to cancel a note. At the auction, Hannah brought a price of 50 cents; "she could be sold for no more," the commissioners noted perfunctorily, "owing to her age & decrepitude."
A second group of county petitions - about 25 percent of the total - come from slaves and free persons of color. In Georgia and South Carolina, for instance, each adult free person of color was required by law to petition the local court to secure a white guardian. In Virginia, slaves emancipated by the will of their owners were permitted to petition the court for their freedom. In Maryland, Tennessee, and Kentucky, free blacks, most often women, presented pleas to local courts concerning a number of economic and family matters. Other county petitions - about 20 percent - concern the theft of slaves, murder, runaways, selling free blacks into bondage, treatment of slaves, slave violence, patrols, rumored insurrections, white militia units, free blacks owning guns, indentures, apprenticeships, self-hire, black preachers, religion, and slaves who obtained the "freedom and privilege" to "work and traffic" for themselves.
Poster for the play Let My People Go. The actors are, from left to right, Stephen Gee, Deborah Kintzing, and Treb Cranford; and Donna Braby (in front), Robin Doby, and Jared Boyd. Photograph by Earl McDonald, National Archives and Records Administration.
Let My People Go
During the initial three years of the project, when the staff included only two part-time graduate students, the editor's wife, Patricia, worked as an unpaid assistant organizing, boxing, and putting citations on the piles of petitions as they arrived at the office. As she did so, she read some of the petitions and thought, "There are many dramatic and poignant stories." She recommended that the editor collaborate with Brenda Schleunes, founding director of the Touring Theatre Ensemble of North Carolina, on a theater piece drawn from the petitions.
Between 1994 and 1996, the editor and Ms. Schleunes put together a "script" based on the original documents. In 1996, Ms. Schleunes raised $50,000 to cast, stage, and perform Let My People Go: The Trials of Bondage in Words of Slave and Master in various locations across North Carolina. The play's premier, in April 1997, concluded to a standing ovation. In the course of the following year, it has been performed 36 times in 15 of the state's counties (Guilford, Forsyth, Rockingham, Burke, Randolph, Carteret, Columbus, Pasquotank, Halifax, New Hanover, Wake, Durham, Buncombe, Jackson, and Yancey), before approximately 6,000 people.
Audience response has tended strongly toward questions, presumably because the play is truly educational in nature and offers those in attendance (roughly two-thirds of whom have been African Americans) much that is completely new to them. The editor has answered questions after each show; topics have included slave holding by free blacks, how slaves could bring law suits, and the status of plantation mistresses. Audience comments have been as follows: "The discussion was as interesting as the theatre piece;" "I'm almost 100 years old, and I learned a lot of things I didn't know;" and "I thought I was just coming to hear another slave story, but I learned things I never even thought about before, like how slavery affected white people and the fact that there were free blacks." The University of North Carolina Department of Communications and Theatre recently filmed Let My People Go for public television.
Recent Developments
The Legislative Petitions (Series 1) are now at the publishers - University Publications of America for microfilm, University of Illinois Press for letterpress. With a grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, a full-time assistant editor was hired in August 1997. Over the past year, the staff has grown from three to eight, and now includes Assistant Editor Robert Shelton, a Ph.D. candidate at Rice University; project assistants Tonya Blair, Jim Giesen, Charles Holden, Adrienne Middlebrooks, and Jeff Winstead; and undergraduate research assistant Jeanette Jennings. The project is examining the feasibility of creating a database Web site at UNCG, which would make available for research more than 11,000 petition analysis records, or PARs, entered in the database to date.
(Loren Schweninger is the editor and director of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project.)
