Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (review)

book reviews341 Anyone contemplating such an undertaking will need to read this book, which makes a valuable contribution not only to the scholarship of a critical and complex era but to our understanding of the differences and similarities that characterized the nineteenth-century South. One South or many? In Tennessee the answer is both. Mark V. Wetherington Filson Club Historical Society Slavery, the CivilLaw, and the Supreme Court ofLouisiana. By Judith Kelleher Schafer. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Pp. xix, 389. $35.00.) For more than seven decades, historians have subjected the Old South's institution of chattel slavery to intense and unremitting scrutiny through various prisms: plantation records, travel accounts, census returns, and slave narratives and autobiographies, to name the most obvious. Recently, the wealth ofmaterial contained in court records has offered a new dimension to the study of the "peculiar institution." For example, Professor Loren Schweninger is currently engaged in amassive project involving chancery court records relating to slavery and race relations. Judith Schäfer has chosen, in this work, to focus on cases involving slavery that were appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court throughout the entire antebellum period. The result is a very useful study that complements the four-volume edition ofJudicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, compiled more than a half-century ago by Helen T. Catterall. Schafer's book is based almost exclusively on an analysis of the hitherto untapped manuscript records of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Only recently made accessible to scholars, these handwritten decisions are much more voluminous than the printed records in their coverage of individual cases. In all, Schäfer examined some 1,200 appellate cases involving slavery; such cases constituted about 7 percent of all Louisiana high court cases heard during the period from 1809 to 1871. Organized topically, the work provides an extensive analysis of cases within various discrete categories, ranging from criminal activity by slaves to warranties in slave sales to emancipation by will or suit. Like other Southern courts, the Supreme Court of Louisiana was constantly obliged to address the inherent conflict resulting from the dual character of slaves as both persons and property. The problem was exacerbated in Louisiana , where slaves were classified under civil law as both real estate and immovable property. As in other slave states, slaves in Louisiana were treated as both persons and property depending on the circumstances of the particular case. Schäfer contends that slave law in Louisiana was ineffectual in protecting slaves against cruel treatment and probably less enlightened than its counterparts in the Anglo-Saxon South in affording protection to slaves accused of crimes. However, in its provisions relating to emancipation, "Louisiana law 342CIVIL WAR HISTORY placed more value on the humanity of slaves . . . than on their status as property " (xiv). Whether or not the colonial heritage of Louisiana produced a milder form of slavery than that which existed in the other slave states, there is no doubt that slave law in the bayou state was characterized by a number of unique features. There was a legal presumption that mulattoes were free; slaves whose masters had been convicted of cruelty could be sold under court order; free persons of color could testify in cases involving whites; and manumission could be achieved before 1857 in several ways without legislative approval. Thus, Louisiana slaves could sue for their freedom; they could contract to purchase their freedom; and they could attain manumission by prescription if they lived as free for ten years, were at least thirty years of age, and had exhibited good behavior for four years prior to emancipation. Clearly written, grounded on prodigious research in judicial records, and enlivened by the details of scores of individual cases, this book contributes significantly to an understanding of the legal status of slaves in a state whose legacy of Roman, Spanish, and French law rendered it unique among the states of the antebellum South. There are, to be sure, some limitations, imposed both by the nature of the sources and by the interpretations of the author. Although the high court of Louisiana was obliged to hear appeals of all cases involving more than three hundred dollars, it should...