Masters on Trial: The Enforcement of Laws against Self-Hire by Slaves in Jacksonville and Palatka, Florida

Masters on Trial: The Enforcement of Laws against Self-Hire by Slaves in Jacksonville and Palatka, Florida Craig Buettinger In March i 858 the grand jury for Duval County, Florida, indicted Samuel N. WilUams of JacksonviUe for allowing his slaves to hire their own time, a violation of an 1856 state law. Thejurors ended their spring term with a presentment promising more indictments ifthe evil of slave self-hire did not cease. The next month, the circuit court having made its way farther south, the Putnam County grand jury indicted WiUiam D. Moseley of Palatka for breaking the 1856 law. These cases surely caused a stir. WilUams came from the ranks of prosperous urban masters with his four slaves. Moseley had been the first governor of the state of Florida and in 1858, with more than one hundred slaves, was the greatest slaveowner in northeast Florida. In the towns along the St. Johns River, a campaign had begun that put masters on trial. ' Self-hire by slaves was an illegal but common practice in antebellum Southern cities, whereby slaveowners permitted bondsmen and women to find their own employment, remitting weekly or monthly sums to their masters. Many Southerners condemned the practice for the troubling latitude that it allowed slaves in the management of their own movements and money. However, as Richard C. Wade shows in Slavery in the Cities, self-hire had custom and usage on its side. This form ofslave labor provided for the flexible allocation ofworkers 1 George Stone voucher, Duval County 1858, Warrant #546, Criminal ProsecutionVouchers, RG 350, ser. 565, box 1, folder 8, Florida State Archives (hereafter FSA); Jacksonville Florida Weekly Republican, March 24, 1858; Minutes ofthe Circuit Court 1850-1859, 383, Putnam County Courthouse , Palatka. On the distribution ofurban slaveholdings see Robert C. Reinders, "Slavery in New Orleans in the Decade before the Civil War," in Plantation, Town, and County: Essays on the Local History ofAmerican Slave Society, ed. ElinorMiller and Eugene D. Genovese (Urbana.: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 369. Unless otherwise noted, the sizes of individual slaveholdings in this essay are taken from the 1 860 census schedules. Civil War History, Vol. xlvi No. 2 © 2000 by The Kent State University Press 92CIVIL WAR HISTORY required by an urban economy without a resort to free labor. It was both convenient and profitable to urban masters.2 States prohibited self-hire by slaves early on, but the statutes accomplished little. The major cities in several states secured exemptions from the self-hire laws. In cities not exempt, the laws gathered dust. The needs ofthe cities and the prerogatives ofmasters reigned as the dominant considerations, and pubUc opinion never sufficiently coalesced to enforcethe self-hire codes.3 Laws were "poorly enforced"; prosecutions were "curiosities."4 The dead-letter statutes perfectly suited the paternalistic slave regime. As Eugene D. Genovese explains, laws forbade masters from permitting their slaves various Uberties but "local authorities , generally subservient to the slaveowners, usually lookedthe other way." Legislation to curb permissiveness existed at the forbearance ofthe slaveowners, to be applied only in disquieting moments of slave unrest. The slave regime deferred to "the master's prerogatives and depended on his discretion."5 The sectional crisis of the 1850s heightened pubUc opposition to customs that left slaves unsupervised, and led to new laws that infringed on planter discretion . State legislators sought to rationaUze and secure the slave regime by interposing the law more than ever before into the master-slave relationship, especially in restricting permissive practices such as self-hire by slaves.6 The 2 Ulrich B. Phillips, "The Slave Labor Problem in the Charleston District," Political Science Quarterly, 22 (Sept. 1907): 423; Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 52. 3 Wilmington and Fayetteville received exemptions in the 1785 North Carolina law; Savannah, Sunbury, and Augusta in the 1803 Georgia law. On the lack of enforcement, see Phillips, "Slave Labor Problem," 423; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 50-51. Edna C. McKenzie, "Self-Hire among Slaves, 1820-1 860: Institutional Variation or Aberration?" (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1973), argues that the persistence of the practice resulted not so much from urban necessity or the...