Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia's Criminal Justice System

Notes

introduction 1. Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, – (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 2. 2. Scholars of the general history of slavery often write on matters of criminal justice using a narrative interpretive approach rather than attempting to quantify these data.Narrative studies are certainly valuable,but without quantification it is impossible to discern patterns in criminal justice over time.Four classic works on Southern slavery define the non-quantitative approach to slaves and free blacks and criminal justice. They are Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime, 2d ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Intellectual Life, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956); and Eugene G. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1976). Each of these books provides significant insight into slaves and criminal justice, and each has influenced subsequent state and local studies of slavery and criminal justice. Georgia studies that follow the narrative approach are Ralph Betts Flanders, Plantation Slavery in Georgia (Cos Cob, Conn.: John E. Edwards, 1967); Donald L. Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, ed. Jonathan Grant (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993); Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, – (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Betty Wood,Slavery in Colonial Georgia, – (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); and Jonathan M. Bryant, How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). A. E. Keir Nash inaugurated the study of appellate decisions with the following articles: “Fairness and Formalism in the Trials of Blacks in State Supreme Courts of the Old South,” Virginia Law Review 56 (1970): 64–100; “A More Equitable Past? Southern Supreme Courts and the Protection of the Antebellum Negro,” North Carolina Law Review 48 (1970): 197–241; “The Texas Supreme Court and the Trial Rights of Blacks, 1845–1860,” Journal of American History 58 (1971): 622–42; and “Reason of Slavery: Understanding NOTES 190 } n o t e s t o pa g e 5 the Judicial Role in the Peculiar Institution,” Vanderbilt Law Review 32 (1979): 7–218. Nash argued that Southern appellate courts provided black defendants with a surprising degree of procedural fairness. Numerous works emerged to support and challenge his conclusions about appellate courts, including Mark V. Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, – (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Daniel J. Flanigan, The Criminal Law of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987); Daniel J. Flanigan, “Criminal Procedure in Slave Trials in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 40 (1974): 405–24; Patrick Brady, “Slavery, Race and the Criminal Law in Antebellum North Carolina: A Reconsideration of the Thomas Ruffin Court,” North Carolina Central Law Journal 10 (1978): 248–60; and A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). (I will discuss Nash and his supporters and detractors in greater detail in chapter 5.) A number of monographs have used quantitative approaches to provide a more detailed picture of criminal justice for blacks, among them Jack Kenny Williams, Vogues in Villainy: Crime and Retribution in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959); Michael Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Arthur F. Howington, What Sayeth the Law: The Treatment of Slaves and Free Blacks in the State and Local Courts of Tennessee (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986); Donna J. Spindel, Crime and Society in North Carolina, – (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Derek N. Kerr, Petty Felony, Slave Defiance and Frontier Villainy: Crime and Criminal Justice in Spanish Louisiana, – (New York: Garland Publishing , 1993); Waldrep, Roots of Disorder; and James M. Denham, “A Rogue’s Paradise”: Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Florida, – (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997). The study...