Counterfeit Justice: The Judicial Odyssey of Texas Freedwoman Azeline Hearne (review)

Former slaves in Texas, as in almost all post-emancipation societies, saw ownership of land as the foundation for a meaningful freedom. Dale Baum's CounterfeitJustice contributes to historians' ongoing examination of the post-Civil War U.S. South, highlighting the role of the law in defining the economic status of former slaves. The book tells the story of one freedwoman's effort to hold onto a plantation which, had she been white, would probably have become hers with a minimal amount of legal fuss.

Azeline Hearne was born into slavery in Louisiana in 1825. In 1853, she and her master, Sam Hearne, came to Robertson County, Texas, then a fast-developing plantation region on the middle Brazos River. Despite Azeline's race and slave status, she and Sam Hearne seem to have lived as husband and wife. The inner workings of their relationship are lost to history, but the couple did have a son named Dock. When Sam Hearne was on his deathbed in the fall of 1866, he made out a will leaving his 903-acre plantation to Dock, who was at the time still a minor. The will also contained provisions for Azeline's maintenance. Although the will was drafted and Same Hearne died after the Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship to former slaves (and therefore made them eligible to hold property and litigate on their own behalf) Sam Hearne apparently anticipated that relatives would contest his will. Sam thus went to great lengths to make sure his wishes were respected. Gravely ill, he journeyed to the county seat to have the will witnessed and he appointed a well-respected white physician to be his executor. He died two months later in November 1866.

The rest of Azeline Hearne's story is a tragic, yet predictable tale of the legal obstacles faced by freedpeople in the aftermath of slavery. The story is also immensely complicated, a veritable tangle of legal maneuvers and counter maneuvers that resulted when Sam Hearne's white relatives contested his will. Dock died during the yellow fever epidemic of 1867, just after reaching the age of majority. Under the terms of the will, the property went directly over to Azeline. Complicating matters were various debts and encumbrances, as well as an old land claim dating to the Mexican era. Illiterate and lacking any legal training whatsoever, Azeline was forced to hire a parade of attorneys, some of whom were incompetent, while others worked actively to defraud her of her inheritance. Because Dock and Azeline were freedpeople, the Freedmen's Bureau took over the adjudication of the estate for a time, with the heirs' legal fortunes fluctuating with the frequent changes at the Robertson County Bureau. The estate was not settled until 1884, when Azeline's lawsuit against her former attorney, Harvey D. Prendergast (in which she was represented by onetime Greenback Party gubernatorial candidate W. H. Hamman) was dismissed on a technicality. Deprived of her inheritance, Azeline drifted into obscurity and probably died in the 1890s.

Azeline Hearne left scant trace in the documentary record, and much about her life remains obscure. Her story emerges almost entirely in court records, with Freedman's Bureau and other documents contributing essential detail. Anyone who has worked with probate and property records will appreciate the tremendous work Baum has done in piecing together the story and making obscure points of law understandable. The book also does a fine job of interweaving the history of Reconstruction in Texas and Robertson County with a narrative of the legal maneuverings; indeed, the two histories intersect at numerous points. Most significantly, in telling Azeline Hearne's story, Baum reveals the formidable legal barriers to black equality in nineteenth-century Texas.