Local Matters

Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South

Paul Finkelman, Timothy Huebner, Christopher Waldrep, Donald Nieman

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780820340814, 9780820322476
• eBook ISBN: 9780820342054
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Law

Much of the current reassessment of race, culture, and criminal justice in the nineteenth-century South has been based on intensive community studies. Drawing on previously untapped sources, the nine original papers collected here represent some of the best new work on how racial justice can be shaped by the particulars of time and place.

Although each essay is anchored in the local, several important larger themes emerge across the volume—such as the importance of personality and place, the movement of former slaves from the capriciousness of "plantation justice" to the (theoretically) more evenhanded processes of the courts, and the increased presence of government in daily aspects of American life.

Local Matters cites a wide range of examples to support these themes. One essay considers the case of a quasi-free slave in Natchez, Mississippi—himself a slaveowner—who was "reined in" by his master through the courts, while another shows how federal aims were subverted during trials held in the aftermath of the 1876 race riots in Ellenton, South Carolina. Other topics covered include the fear of black criminality as a motivation of Klan activity; the career of Thomas Ruffin, slaveowner and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice; blacks and the ballot in Washington County, Texas; the overturned murder conviction of a North Carolina slave who had killed a white man; the formation of a powerful white bloc in Vicksburg, Mississippi; agitation by black and white North Carolina women for greater protections from abusive white male elites; and slaves, crime, and the common law in New Orleans.

Together, these studies offer new insights into the nature of law and the fate of due process at different stages of a highly racialized society.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• Judging Slavery: Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann
• The Roots of Fairness: State v. Caesar and Slave Justice in Antebellum North Carolina
• Slaves and Crime: New Orleans, 1846–1862
• The Law and the Culture of Slavery: Natchez, Mississippi
• Women and the Law: Domestic Discord in North Carolina After the Civil War
• Extralegal Violence and the Planter Class: The Ku Klux Klan in the Alabama Black Belt During Reconstruction
• Federal Enforcement of Black Rights in the Post-Redemption South: The Ellenton Riot Case
• African American Communities, Politics, and Justice: Washington County, Texas, 1865–1890
• Black Political Leadership: Warren County, Mississippi
• Contributors
• Index