Let Whiskey Run Out Of His Mouth

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.

Comments

[Alfred Brophy]

Very cool, Sarah. It never ceases to surprise me how much insight we can squeeze out of criminal law cases.

[Sarah Swan]

Thanks, Al - both for your kind words and for posting on the Dennis piece in the first place!