Last week, Al posted about
Andrea Dennis’ A Snitch In Time:
An Historical Sketch of Black Informing During Slavery.
Among other fascinating vignettes, Dennis
offers an example of how slave owners used criminal law “
to prevent other
Whites from interfering with the owner’s interests.”
In Harrington v. State, an 1860 case from
Alabama, a slave owner had his slave purchase alcohol from a grocer, in order
to prove that the grocer was committing the offense of selling alcohol to
slaves without the written permission of their owners.
The case is striking for
all the reasons
Dennis notes, and also for a couple of additional reasons.
First, the accused grocer was a woman, which
makes the case an interesting piece of the gender and alcohol story I’ve recently
been reading about in
Domesticating Drink: Women, Men and Alcohol in America,
1870 – 1940).
Second, and relatedly, the
case exposes the existence of a black market that supplied alcohol to
slaves in contravention of the prohibition.
There's an intriguing confluence of law, gender, race, and markets here, along with the rich themes of snitching and informing that Dennis focuses on.
Also of note: the judge’s description of the evidence in the
case is remarkably evocative. He writes
of how the slave owner, Thomas Lyon, had the slave, Robert, go to the grocery, where “the
defendant opened the door, and let in said slave, who then went in, and came
out in a short time […] and then crossed over to said Lyon, and held his two
hands together, forming a kind of cup, and let whiskey run out of his mouth into
his hands; and that said slave, some ten minutes previously, had gone into
another grocery, and brought out liquor in his mouth, and poured it into his
hands in the same way.” Given all that's going on in this case, it's a pity that the judgment isn't longer - Catharine Harrington sounds like quite a character.
Very cool, Sarah. It never ceases to surprise me how much insight we can squeeze out of criminal law cases.
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | October 07, 2013 at 12:58 PM
Thanks, Al - both for your kind words and for posting on the Dennis piece in the first place!
Posted by: Sarah Swan | October 08, 2013 at 10:45 AM