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

4 "SOME CONVENIENT METHOD AND FORM OF TRYAL": The Trial Process

The worst system which could be devised . . . —Judge John Belton O’Neall, South Carolina Court of Law and Errors,  For white Georgians,the blacks in their midst constituted a dangerous internal enemy—one whose behavior had to be strictly controlled. Georgia legislators crafted a criminal justice system that charged masters with maintaining their slave forces in due subordination, and granted them wide latitude to enable them to do so. Slave owners detected crimes, adjudicated cases, and punished offenders with relatively little interference from the outside world. In this informal plantation justice system, offenders could be tried, convicted, and punished in a matter of minutes, with no avenue of appeal beyond the master’s conscience. An elaborate formal criminal justice system awaited those bondspeople who violated interests outside their plantations or farms. By the late antebellum period, this formal system mirrored that of whites in almost every respect, but the consequences for black defendants were far different. Despite increasing legal protections, blacks were convicted at rates that far exceeded those of white defendants.Whites’ commitment to slavery and to maintaining their superior racial position produced this disparate treatment. { The Plantation Trial Process One Georgia ex-slave said, “I never heard of or knew of a slave being tried in a court for anything.” Slaves were judged, but not by courts {4 “some convenient method and form of tryal” The Trial Process t h e t r i a l p r o c e s s { 83 or juries.Slaveholders were the prosecutors,judges,and juries.Most former slaves queried by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) interviewers during the Great Depression could remember no instance (in the late antebellum period) of a slave on trial in a court or jailed by the government for a crime committed on the plantation, not even for murder. “Marster never had to take none of his Niggers to court or put ’em in jail neither; him and de overseer sot ’im right,” said another Georgia ex-bondsman. With rare exceptions, farm or plantation crimes never made their way to state courts. The quality of justice slaves received depended on the sense of justice their masters and mistresses possessed.1 What actually happened to the thousands and thousands of slaves found guilty or innocent, punished by whipping or mutilation, or sold off the plantation by masters, no one can say for sure. Their “trials” took place on private property, beyond the prying eyes and review of the public. But South Carolina planter, politician, and proslavery ideologue James Henry Hammond boasted: “On our estates we dispense with the whole machinery of public police and public courts of justice. Thus we try, decide, and execute the sentences, in thousands of cases, which in other countries would go into the courts.”2 The Old South ideal of mastery decreed that the planter/slaveowner was a judge—of a slave’s productivity in work and in breeding; of a slave’s deference , sociability, and health; and of all other matters related to the smooth functioning of his economic and social enterprise. The slaveholder’s principal responsibility was to assess the behaviors of all his dependents, family and slaves alike,and to take preventative,corrective,or punitive action when the situation seemed to him to demand it. This process of largely unmonitored private judgment extended from the control of ordinary living to the acts of slaves who violated a plantation criminal code that the slaveholder himself had crafted; as its drafter, he was considered best qualified to interpret and implement it. The historian Philip J. Schwarz describes slaveowners and their agents, the overseers, as “the first rule-makers, the corrections officers, and even sometimes the executioners” in the plantation criminal justice system.Like monarchs,masters had to “answer to few people,”ruled in “almost complete privacy,” and were, in the end, the supreme authorities on their lands.3 Slave narratives in Georgia and elsewhere are replete with examples of masters and overseers who rendered judgment and sentenced slaves to the lash—or worse. In best-case scenarios, a trial of sorts took place. On one 84 } c r i m i n a l i n j u s t i c e Georgia estate, the master produced one or two of the involved parties as witnesses. The judge-master interviewed these people in the presence of the accused, then allowed the slave defendant to correct their testimony and...