I've been blogging a bunch of late about my paper on the Nat Turner trials. The paper is largely concerned with the trials in the wake of the rebellion and what they say about the nature of slavery-era jurisprudence. I've been long interested in the aftermath of the rebellion, when the Virginia legislature debated what to do about slavery. Then in the wake of those debates William and Mary Professor Thomas Roderick Dew emerged with his Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature, which was an important proslavery pamphlet. In fact the first chatper of University, Court, and Slave is called "The Rebel and the Professor." I use Nat Turner and Thomas Dew to set the entire book in motion.
This began as a short paper on what I thought I would call "micro-trials" (borrowing from from Kaimi Wenger's phrase micro-reparations) -- trials that lasted a short time for which the outcome was fore-ordained. But I soon realized that there were more complexities to the trials than I -- or most other people who'd looked at them -- had thought. Some of the slaves were charged only with conspiracy rather than murder or insurrection. There is a lot of evidence about who the witnesses were in the trials (even if not much on what they said); more people were found not guilty in Southampton than I'd expected at first. Though in the neighboring county of Sussex, where there was no overt rebellion, the court was extremely harsh on defendants. The defense lawyers, particularly James Strange French, appeared of increasing importance in this story, as did some of the judges. And to tell the story of the trials I realized that I needed to go back and tell something of the story of the rebellion. There, too, there was more evidence to harvest than I'd expected. I was super-excited by slave-owners' petitions to the Virginia legislature for their slaves who were killed during and immediately after the rebellion. Those petitions contained evidence of the circumstances of the killings, the extent of them, and also the arguments that the petitioners thought might appeal to the legislature. The appeal was to the legislature to bear the cost so that individual slave-owners would not have to.
Anyway, here's my abstract:
“The Nat Turner Trials” locates the trials of slaves in the wake of the Nat Turner rebellion in the context of common, and statutory, law and extra-legal responses to slavery in Virginia and North Carolina during the early 1830s. The Article shows how trials were part of the whole system of slavery, held together by norms of white supremacy promulgated in the press, the pulpit, and on plantations. Decisions from local courts to appellate courts gave broad power to slave owners to control enslaved people. There was little done in defense of slaves, though in some ways the states’ criminal procedure statutes and the actions of some slave owners and defense lawyers may have helped to limit the number of convictions.
The article is framed by two cases in North Carolina — one in 1830 of a white man who attacked a slave in his custody and was freed from punishment and another in 1834 of a slave who killed his overseer and was found guilty of manslaughter rather than premeditated murder. Sandwiched between those two cases was the Nat Turner rebellion in neighboring Virginia during August of 1831. The trials of those accused of rebellion and conspiracy, along with the vigilante violence that accompanied the rebellion, further illustrate the ways the legal system functioned to support slavery and order.
The article highlights how trials of slaves in the wake of the Nat Turner rebellion worked to re-establish order and to mete out punishment. It also reveals how lawyers for the slaves labored — largely unsuccessfully — to free those most obviously not guilty. Those lawyers were committed to the re-establishment of order; all of the key lawyers had participated in the militia response to the rebellion. Yet the defense lawyers still tried to limit convictions, and they succeeded to some extent.
The trials worked in conjunction with — and sometimes in opposition to — the extra-legal violence that accompanied the repression of the rebellion. The trials reveal, as did the two Supreme Court of North Carolina cases that bookend this Article, the conflicts within the community, as some emphasized the power of slave owners to treat slaves as they wished, while others emphasized the subjection of everyone, including owners of slaves, to the rule of law. The court struggled in part with trying to keep the community from taking vigilante action. It also acted to punish the rebels and to discourage further rebellion.
The trials tell compact, linear stories about why someone is being punished (or not). The trials are obscure, but collectively they tell a powerful story about the role of law in American history as a vehicle for establishing order.
If this intersts you, I hope you'll have a look. I'm planning on some more work on this once I finish off University, Court, and Slave, so I'd be most interested in your thoughts.
I have used an image of the Sussex County Courthouse to illustrate this post. The Sussex County rebels were tried there. The Southampton Courthouse wasn't built until 1834, so it is not the one where the Southampton rebels were tried.
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