Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

2. Rewriting the Free Negro Past: Joseph Lumpkin, Proslavery Ideology, and Citizenship in Antebellum Georgia

2 Rewriting the Free Negro Past Joseph Lumpkin, Proslavery Ideology, and Citizenship in Antebellum Georgia Watson Jennison By the 1850s the debate over slavery had reached its peak. In the midst of growing sectionalism and political conflict, slavery’s defenders and its opponents engaged in a heated battle over the true nature of bondage in the U.S. South and its impact on those enslaved. Though both sides looked to similar sources, such as the Bible and science, to legitimate their respective positions, they came to radically different conclusions. These debates concerned not only the fate of the slave population in the South but also the place of the free black population. Free blacks were a focal point in the ideological struggle over slavery. Their collective condition figured prominently in the discussions over the institution. At issue was their ability or inability to survive without white oversight. Slavery’s proponents presented all people of African descent as incapable of caring for themselves, regardless of their legal status, and defended the institution by portraying it as a “civilizing school” that rid slaves of their supposed savagery and taught them basic life skills. They characterized free black life as an inescapable and endless cycle of poverty , ignorance, and vice that produced individuals who were a drain on society as well as a potential threat to the social order. As such, they contended , emancipating slaves was not only wrong but inhumane. Although white northerners were similarly hostile to the notion that blacks were equal to whites, most were less inclined to cast free blacks in such unequivocally negative terms or to deprive them of basic rights. Indeed, free blacks retained privileges of citizenship, including the right to vote, in New York and most of New England throughout the antebellum 42 · Watson Jennison era. By extending these privileges to free blacks, the legislatures in these northern states undermined one of the key pillars of the proslavery argument —that blacks were so racially inferior that they could never be capable of enjoying the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. In response to this challenge, legislatures and courts across the South rewrote their laws pertaining to free blacks and authorized the enactment of increasingly harsh restrictions in an effort to make their legal status in southern society adhere more closely to proslavery doctrine. One of the leading figures in the assault on free black rights was Justice Joseph Lumpkin of Georgia. He was the legal architect of the state’s antebellum slave regime. He arguably possessed the most influence of any man in Georgia in official matters relating to race and slavery, having authored the opinions in more than half of the sixty most important cases related to those issues during his twenty-one years on the bench. Through these decisions , Lumpkin molded Georgia’s antebellum legal code to conform to his vision of a properly ordered slave society, one that had no place for free blacks. He ruled that free blacks were not and never had been and never would be citizens in Georgia. Indeed, he defined the free black population as the antipodes to Georgia’s white citizenry. In his characterization of free blacks and his reshaping of Georgia’s slave law, Lumpkin stood at the vanguard of a southern movement promoting proslavery ideology in the legal realm.1 In his opinions, Lumpkin erased free blacks from Georgia’s early history and reduced their diversity in status to a simple stereotype. Lumpkin cast white Georgians’ perceptions of free blacks in monolithic terms that defied historical reality. Some free blacks had acted as and been recognized as citizens of the state. In rewriting this past, Lumpkin ignored earlier white sentiments that provided space for free blacks as citizens in Georgia. Indeed, even in the 1850s, such sentiments still existed in pockets of the state. Yet, despite his errors, Lumpkin had a profound impact on southern law and national law. Moreover, it was his vision that served as the basis for future scholarship on race and the place of free blacks in society by legal scholars and historians. Thus the legacy of his decisions long outlasted his life. * * * That Lumpkin would emerge as the key defender of slavery in Georgia was far from clear during his early years. Lumpkin was born in 1799 in Joseph Lumpkin, Proslavery Ideology, and Citizenship in Antebellum Georgia · 43 Oglethorpe County. His family migrated to Georgia from Virginia and settled...