Counterfeit Justice: The Judicial Odyssey of Texas Freedwoman Azeline Hearne

Introduction

1. For information about the French prénom “Azéline,” see: www.prenoms.com/echerche/ prenom.php/fiche/azeline (accessed Jan. 21, 2003). Azeline was the contemporary of a white woman whose name appears in the county courthouse records as “Assaline Dechard” (see P. C. Introduction It must be remembered that Assaline Hearne is an ignorant freedwoman and from her status in society is deprived of that physical protection which others possess. —Harvey D. Prendergast, Attorney for Azeline Hearne, to Charles E. Morse, n.d. By the end of the twentieth century all recollection of Azeline Hearne had vanished in the slow eddies of time. When her name appears in surviving documents, it is usually spelled “Assaline” or “Asaline” or, less frequently, “Azalene,” and incorrectly most often as “Adaline.” Because she was born into slavery in probably a French-speaking area of Louisiana, the various spellings of her slave name are corruptions of the uncommon name “Azéline,” a surname that by the turn of the twenty-first century still remained on France’s official list of legally acceptable feminine prénoms . While the accent would have normally been placed on the second syllable, the recurrent appearance of her name written as “Assaline” indicates that Anglo Texans mimicked the pronunciations of former slaves, who placed the accent on the first syllable. Her name was not limited exclusively to black women. The name “Azeline” or “Asaline” was frequently used as a middle name of southern white women in the nineteenth century.1 2 Counterfeit Justice Except for a glimpse into her legal battles and difficulties immediately after her emancipation from slavery, most of Azeline’s story is and will remain unknown. The antebellum “Slave Schedules” of the federal manuscript censuses do not contain her name, or for that matter the name of any slave. Nor can she be located in any census taken after the Civil War. However, the federal census enumerators who visited the Hearne family plantations in Louisiana and Texas in 1850 and 1860, respectively, listed what, by a process of elimination, had to have been her respective ages, making calculation of her year of birth possible. Enough other pieces of information can be recovered from obscurity to construct an outline of her story—a narrative that neither she nor the major players in her legal disputes could ever have assembled by themselves.2 Azeline survived forty years as an enslaved female only to become in her old age a reclusive, sickly, and impoverished woman wandering from place to place in the Brazos River “bottomlands” in Robertson County, Texas. She was never acknowledged by society to have in any way influenced the course of historical events. Yet her life revealed as much about the period of Reconstruction after the American Civil War as the lives of many who attained distinction through their fame or extraordinary achievements. Although U.S. congressional control of the course of Reconstruction allowed freedom’s first generation of African Americans to play a central role in the postwar adjustments that radically changed the world the slaveholders had made, what happened to Azeline demonstrated the limits to what could have been achieved in the way of securing legal equality and fair treatment for the former slaves throughout the postwar South. During slavery Azeline had cohabitated with her unmarried and wealthy master, Samuel (“Sam”) R. Hearne. She bore him four children, only one of whom survived early childhood. When Sam Hearne died in 1866, his will acknowledged, to the dismay of his brothers and cousins, his years Dechard vs. Assaline Dechard, Case No. 2027, [February Term, 1875], Book “M,” p. 416, MDC, Robertson County, Texas). 2. On Samuel R. Hearne’s plantations in Louisiana and Texas, the only female slaves with matching ages are a twenty-five-year-old listed in 1850 and another one recorded as thirtyfive years of age in 1860. See: Bureau of the Census, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Microfilm Roll #242, Louisiana [Slave Schedules] “Bienville— Concordia,” p. 887, M432, NA (1963); and Bureau of the Census, Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Microfilm Roll #1312, Texas [Slave Schedules] vol. 2 (307–628), “Robertson County,” p. 25 [printed p. 316], M653, NA (1967). Introduction 3 of miscegenation by its bequeathal of his entire estate to his twenty-yearold mulatto son with a provision that he take care of his mother...