Suing Whites: Black Litigants and the Politics of Daily Life in the Antebellum Natchez District

In the antebellum South, among the sprawling plantations of the Natchez district, in a society in which slavery was deeply entrenched and violently defended, black people sued white people.  They often won.  This is a phenomenon that has largely been overlooked by historians.  But it ought not to be, because it speaks to the heart of the ways in which we understand the operation of power, of law and politics, and of racial hierarchies in the slave South.

This paper investigates unpublished lower court records from the Natchez district of Mississippi and Louisiana between 1820 and 1860 in which free blacks (and in a few remarkable cases slaves) sued whites to enforce terms of their contracts, to recover unpaid debts, back wages, or damages for assault, and in disagreements over cattle, land, slaves, and other property. Suing whites had effects that reached beyond the courtroom, insofar as the mere act of recognition was similarly an acknowledgement, albeit a contingent one, of the potential for blacks to be more than the object of regulation.  By confronting their white neighbors or owners in court, black litigants forced white southerners to recognize them as worthy adversaries. Moreover, investigating African Americans’ litigation against whites opens doors for insight into how power functioned on the ground in a slave society.  It provides a more nuanced understanding of the operation of legal power and its relation to other forms of power, including political power.  Free blacks and slaves did not have access to formal positions of institutional power such as office-holding or voting.  However, we err if we jump to the conclusion that their words and actions were therefore without any influence.  Through their actions in the courtroom, African Americans also helped create and negotiate the rules that shaped the “small politics” of daily life.