Session Abstract

Drawing on evidence from freedom suits, slander litigation, newspapers accounts of trials, church disciplinary hearings, and other local legal sources from Virginia, Mississippi, Missouri, and Louisiana, this panel examines the political, social, and legal capital of reputation in the antebellum U.S. South.  In the face-to-face society of the antebellum South, a person’s reputation was paramount.  A good reputation represented an individual’s most valuable social possession, as well as his or her most vulnerable commodity.  Reputations required public assessment.  A person’s “common repute” depended on a public evaluation of his or her character and actions.  Because reputations centered on the estimation and judgment of others, they were unstable, constantly made and remade.  Ordinary southerners took care to nurture their reputations, and legal proceedings served as a crucial forum for protecting and defending a good name. 

This panel seeks to understand how subordinated people who were traditionally assumed marginalized from participation in the legal and governance processes in the Old South mobilized the politics of reputation to their greater benefit. It explores how slaves and free people of color used law to defend their own reputations and to challenge the reputations of their superiors.  Even the most powerful members of southern society were susceptible to a judging public, a public that included African Americans.  As these papers demonstrate, litigation involving reputations brings into focus the ability of African Americans to help shape the social order in their communities, despite their exclusion from formal law and politics.  Law was not only the weapon of the elite—it was also a weapon of the subordinated.     

As recent scholarship on law and governance in the nineteenth-century U.S. South suggests, ordinary people influenced the legal and political processes that occurred within their communities.  The legal process was inseparable from social relations in particular communities. Community norms as well as formal rules of evidence and legal language influenced disputes.  Antebellum southern society was, as scholar David M. Potter describes it, a “folk culture” characterized by “personalism,” a dense network of community and person-to-person relations.  In the small communities that made up much of the Old South, public and private life overlapped.  Members of southern communities were on constant display because everyone knew or knew of most everyone else.  Despite southern society’s rigid hierarchies, personal and direct knowledge of one’s neighbors accustomed community members to gauge the individual measure of a man or woman, white or black.  For free and enslaved African Americans, this sometimes meant the opportunity to be judged as human beings and could widen their access to and influence on the local courts.