Race or Reputation? Public Petitions for Pardons and Free People of Color in Early National North Carolina

This paper examines several public petitions sent to the governor of North Carolina on the behalf of free people of color. In each of these cases, white neighbors sought clemency from the governor in support a local free person of color. The petitions reveal tensions between local needs and understandings and the depersonalized objectives of state law. The law often portrayed free people of color as pariahs. Yet nineteenth-century white southerners held complicated views about the positions of the free people of color who they encountered in their everyday lives. White people’s thoughts in regards to free people of color within their communities were often at odds. The judgments of jurors could conflict with the interests and opinions of their neighbors. For a judge or jury a free man of color sentenced to die for a murder may have been simply a guilty party. Yet for the neighbors of the free man of color, an execution meant the loss of an asset. In other cases, neighbors simply disagreed with the juries’ determinations and sought to remedy what they viewed as miscarriages of justice. Although white neighbors played an imperative role in the petition campaign, this paper will also highlight the importance of individual free people of color in the clemency process. White neighbors did not simply seek pardons for the most common free persons of color. Those free people of color who were the subjects of petition campaigns had cultivated strong relations and personal reputations in order to come to the attention of their neighbors during times of distress.