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“I Could Not Come in Unless over their Dead Bodies”: Dignitary Offenses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2020

Thavolia Glymph
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Abstract

Scott gives us an expansive and critically important way of thinking about the ways in which former slaves and formerly free black people like Ransier, Bowers, Holmes, and the men and women of Front Street Church, understood the meaning of freedom and confronted the “all de day and every day” dignitary offenses they faced in the courts, on sidewalks, on public conveyances, in public places of amusement and houses of worship, and in their daily work and family lives. Her account of the response of cosmopolitan activists and lawmakers In New Orleans has tremendous implications for the struggle elsewhere. The concept of “public rights” that activists in Louisiana located in a “claim to respect in the activities of a shared and social ‘common life,’” excited the cause throughout the South.

Type
Invited Article
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 585 - 598
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History

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Footnotes

She thanks Rebecca Scott and Gautham Rao for their generous reading of the essay, the anonymous reader, and Kate Masur who declined anonymity and asked to be identified.

References

1. John Adams, “Thoughts on Government, April 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0026-0004 (accessed May 2020). (Original source: Taylor, Robert J., ed., The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, Vol. 4, February–August 1776 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979], 86–93Google Scholar.)

2. Douglass, Frederick, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written by Himself (1892; Reprint, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company 1962), 143Google Scholar.

3. “Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of the State of South Carolina,” Proceedings of the Colored People's Convention of the State of South Carolina, Held in Zion Church, Charleston, November, 1865, Together with the Declaration of Rights and Wrongs, An Address to the People; A Petition to the Legislature, and a Memorial to Congress (Charleston: South Carolina Leader Office, 1865), 24.

4. Quotes are from Rebecca J. Scott, “Discerning a Dignitary Offense: The Concept of Equal ‘Public Rights’ During Reconstruction,” Law and History Review 38 (2020): 520.

5. Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and the World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Viking Press, 2016), 469.

6. See, for example, Frederick C. Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865–1900 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Linda J. Morgan, Emancipation in Virginia's Tobacco Belt, 1850–1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992); Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery, 1862–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market on the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

7. For important exceptions, see Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Beth Kressel Itkin, “Creating ‘What Might Have Been a Fuss’: The Many Faces of Equal Public Rights in Reconstruction-era Louisiana,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 56 (2015): 42–74; Blair L.M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Tamika Y. Nunley, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2021); Tamika Y. Nunley, “Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts,” Journal of Southern History 87:1 (forthcoming 2021); Tamika Y. Nunley, “‘By Stealth’ or Dispute: Freedwomen and the Contestation of American Citizenship,” in The Civil War and the Transformation of the American Citizenship, ed. Paul Quigley (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018); and A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, “Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accommodations, and Civil Rights in America,” Law and History Review 23 (2005): 53–94.

8. Quotes at Scott, “Discerning a Dignitary Offense,” 522.

9. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Vol. 2, South Carolina Narratives, Pt. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), 297. Ira Berlin began his seminal article on slavery and memory with this quote from Holmes. Ira Berlin, “American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice,” The Journal of American History 90 (2004): 1251.

10. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

11. R.J.M. Blackett, The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Stephanie M. H. Camp. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Kelly M. Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Judith K. Schaer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); and Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

12. The rebellion led by the enslaved woman Rose in South Carolina near the end of the Civil War is exemplary in this regard. See Thavolia Glymph, “Rose's War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (2013): 501–32.

13. Scott, Degrees of Freedom; Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights and Private Commerce: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary,” Current Anthropology 48 (2007): 237–56; and Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 121–38.

14. Scott, “Discerning a Dignitary Offense,” 523.

15. Reverend L. S. Burkhead, History of the Difficulties of the Pastorate of the Front Street Methodist Church, Wilmington, N.C for the Year 1865, An Annual Publication of Historical Papers, Vol. 8 (Durham, NC: Historical Society of Trinity College, 1908–1909), 98–99, 95; W. M. Poison to President [Andrew] Johnson, April 18, 1866, NC Assistant Commissioner, ser. 2452, Box 1, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen & Abandoned Lands (hereafter BRFAL), RG 105, National Archives (hereafter NA); Lieut. Col. Allan Rutherford, Superintendent of the Southern District to Brig. Gen. E. Whittlesay, Assistant Commissioner, May 28, 1866, Raleigh North Carolina Assistant Commissioner, ser. 2452, BRFAL, RG 105, NA; “A Brief History of Grace Church, Wilmington, NC,” Methodist Church Papers, Historical Sketches of Churches, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

16. Burkhead, History of the Difficulties of the Pastorate of the Front Street Methodist Church, 39; Rutherford to Whittlesay, ser. 2452, BRFAL, RG 105, NA.

17. Scott, “Discerning a Dignitary Offense,” 535.

18. “Declaration of Rights and Wrongs,” Proceedings of the Colored People's Convention of the State of South Carolina.

19. Scott, “Discerning a Dignitary Offense,” 528.

20. “Proceedings of the Convention,” Proceedings of the Colored People's Convention of the State of South Carolina, 22; “Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of the State of South Carolina,” Proceedings of the Colored People's Convention of the State of South Carolina, 25; “Address to the Legislature of the State of South Carolina,” Proceedings of the Colored People's Convention of the State of South Carolina, 28.

21. Forty-eight of the delegates to the South Carolina Constitution Convention of 1868 were white, two-thirds of whom were originally from the South. Seventy-six delegates were black, over half of whom had been enslaved before the war. South Carolina was the only state in which black men made up a majority of the delegates. South Carolina had a majority black population and like New Orleans, Charleston, South Carolina boasted a sizeable antebellum free black population.

22. “Constitution of the Equal Rights League,” Article 2, in Minutes of the Freedmen's Convention, Held in the City of Raleigh on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th of October, 1866, Colored Convention, Raleigh NC, 1865 called by The Equal Rights League (Raleigh, NC: Standard Book and Job Office, 1866), 27. The North Carolina State Equal Rights League, founded in 1865, grew out of the state's first freedmen's convention held in Raleigh on September 29, 1865. “Address of the Freedmen's Convention to the White and Colored Citizens of North Carolina.” From Minutes of the Freedmen's Convention, 26–27. https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/address-raleigh-freedmens (accessed January 2019). On mass political organizing during Reconstruction, see Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 163–313. On the Colored Conventions, see the indispensable Web site, http://coloredconventions.org.

23. Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina Held at Charleston, S. C., beginning January 14th and ending March 17th, 1868 Including the Debates and Proceedings, Reported by J. Woodruff, Phonographic Reporter, Two Volumes in One, Published by Order of the Convention (Charleston, SC: Denny & Perry, 1868), 315. Ransier was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1868, became lieutenant governor in 1870, and served in the 43rd United States Congress from the 2nd Congressional District from 1873 to 1875. Cardozo, elected secretary of state in 1868, was the first black person to hold a statewide office in South Carolina. Cardozo left for the University of Glasgow in 1858 and attended seminaries in Edinburg and London, becoming an ordained Presbyterian minister. He returned to the United States in 1864 and became pastor of Temple Street Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut, whose antislavery pastors had included former slave James W.C. Pennington. Formerly free black men played prominent roles in the conventions of 1868. Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 9–10; Foner, Reconstruction, 12; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 402–5; William C. Hine, “Ransier, Alonzo Jacob,” American National Biography 18 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 151–52.

24. Special Correspondent, “Grand Procession of Colored Loyalists. Ovation to General Saxton, Honors to Northern Men. Many Changes, The Oath,” New-York Daily Tribune, April 4, 1865, p. 6.

25. Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina Held at Charleston, 315. Pillsbury, the brother of well-known abolitionist, Parker Pillsbury, misstated the placement of the phrase in the Constitution as the Bill of Rights; it appeared in Article 4, Sec. 2. See Stacey M. Robinson, Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

26. The Constitution of South Carolina, Adopted April 16, 1868, and the Acts and Joint Resolutions of the General Assembly Passed at the Special Session of 1868, Together with the Military Orders Therein Re-enacted. Printed by order of the General Assembly, and Designed to form a Part of the Fourteenth Volume of the Statutes at Large, Commencing with the Acts of 1868 (Columbia, SC: John W. Denny, Printer to the State, 1868), 3–6, quote at 6.

27. Ibid., 19, 165, 204. The constitution also included language prohibiting distinctions on the basis of race, color, creed, or “previous condition” in reference to the right of suffrage, public schools, the University of South Carolina, and orphanages.

28. Bernard E. Powers, Jr., “Community Evolution and Race Relations in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 95 (1994): 32, 35, 37–38; and William C. Hine, “The 1867 Charleston Streetcar Sit-Ins: A Case of Successful Black Protest,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 77 (1976): 114.

29. “An Act to Enforce the Provisions of the Civil Rights Bill of the United States,” adopted February 13, 1869, in Statutes at Large of the State of South Carolina, Passed at the Regular Session of 1869–70 (Columbia, SC: John W. Denning, Printer to the State, 1870), 179.

30. “An Act to Secure Equal Civil Rights, and to Provide for the Enjoyment of all Remedies in Law by all Persons, Regardless of Race or Color,” approved February 14, 1870, in Statutes at Large of the State of South Carolina, 337–38.

31. “An Act to Enforce the Provisions of the Civil Rights Bill of the United States Congress, and to Secure to the People the Benefits of a Republican Government in this State,” Statutes at Large of the State of South Carolina.

32. Ibid., 386–88.

33. Powers, “Community Evolution and Race Relations,” 35–36. Indictments were returned in the summer of 1870, but the litigants reached an out-of-court settlement with the proprietors, who agreed to end discrimination.

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36. Burkhead, History of the Difficulties of the Pastorate of the Front Street Methodist Church, 44.

37. Papers and Testimony in the Contested Election Case of C.J. Stolbrand v. D. Wyatt Aiken from the Third Congressional District of South Carolina, 47th Cong., 1st sess., Misc. Doc. no. 23, January 10, 1882, 71–72.

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