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Vol. 30:3 ISSN 0160-8460 September 2002
County Court Records and the South's Peculiar Institution
by Loren Schweninger
On July 6, 1838, sitting in his study at Hays Mount, a plantation in Greene County, Alabama, slaveowner George Hays wrote his Last Will and Testament. During his life, he had accumulated an enormous estate. Among the wealthiest men in the state, he owned four plantations with cotton lands stretching as far as the eye could see. He also owned livestock, including "Cattle, sheep, mares, colts, Geldings, fillies, Jacks & Jinnies"; farm machinery; tools; furniture; stocks and bonds; and about 180 slaves.
In his will, Hays bequeathed his wife an annuity of $1,500 (a substantial sum at a time when day laborers earned a dollar a day), their home plantation, three body servants, a carriage driver, and a gardener. He left the remainder of his vast holdings to his three children, one of them future Alabama Congressman Charles Hays, who was 4 years old at the time. Exactly 2 weeks later, George Hays died.
In early 1839, William P. Gould, a businessman who later became the Director of the Bank of Mobile, qualified as executor of Hays' estate. In the months and years that followed, a remarkable story unfolded in the heart of Alabama's Black Belt, in a county where blacks outnumbered whites by more than two to one, and where the rich loamy soil along the Tombigbee River produced more than 6,000 bales of cotton each year.
It began when Hays' widow, Ann, opted to claim a dower rather than accept what her husband set aside for her in his will. She filed suit and won a judgment giving her one-third of Hays' landed estate, worth much more than what she would have received by the will. Gould then sued the widow on behalf of her children, but the court ruled in her favor. Sometime later, she remarried and took possession of 43 slaves.
During the next 5 years a number of new suits were initiated, with two cases eventually reaching the Alabama Supreme Court. The results proved to be disastrous for Hays' children as well as for the slaves they owned. In 1852, the children (through legal counsel) charged that Gould had not only mismanaged their property but had hired a brutal and oppressive overseer, Joseph Carnathan, who "inflicted cruel and unusual punishments upon the slaves." He whipped a slave named George so viciously that he lost his right eye. He abused another slave named Claiborne, "getting him down and jumping upon his back with the heels of his shoes and by other great injuries, whereby the said Claiborne has been and is deprived of the entire use of his right shoulder and right arm." And he beat a slave named Sharper so savagely that he died.
The Hays children charged further that Carnathan and his young, inexperienced nephew, who also became an overseer, treated the female slaves even worse. They drove the women to the fields in the worst weather; compelled them to undertake heavy labor, such as lifting and rolling logs and erecting fence posts; and forced them to live in "miserable Hovels not fit for horse Stables." They even refused to provide them with blankets or bed clothing during the coldest nights of the winter.
As a result, virtually all of the "breeding women on said Plantations were rendered almost entirely barren, and worthless as such." The petitioners listed Hannah, big Judy, Inkey, Keziah, Nisha, Mary, Judy, Betty, Sillah, big Milly, Milly, and 19 other women who were in such a condition. Other women were "so injured that they are subject to continual miscarriages." Moreover, 15 slave children died from neglect and exposure, while a number of other children were lost to disease. A few black women had abortions. The Hays children won their case in the lower court, but eventually lost on appeal. In any event, the damage was irreparable.
The Hays civil suit in the chancery court of Greene County is one of approximately 15,500 cases (including 125,000 pages of documentary evidence) that will be published in a microfilm edition by the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro during the next 3 years. These cases represent a selected group of the total number of extant county court civil suits on the subject, but the petitions will come from all 15 states of the South and the District of Columbia and about one-third of the counties in the region (excluding west Texas and western Missouri).
Underwritten by the NHPRC, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the project is in its final stages. Assistant editor Marguerite Ross Howell and other members of the staff, including Kate Knight and Diana Sweatt, are currently checking and final-editing Petition Analysis Records (PARs), which summarize each case in the published collection.
The microfilming of the county court petitions for Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi was recently completed by University Publications of America, and the company will soon publish a 400-page, frame-specific index and guide for these four states. Other groups of states (and one large collection for Louisiana) will be published in a similar fashion in the future. The recently completed 23-reel microfilm edition (University Publications of America, 1999), a book edition titled The Southern Debate over Slavery: Petitions to Southern Legislatures and County Courts, 1778-1864 (University of Illinois Press, 2001), and a searchable web site for legislative petitions will serve as a prototype for the forthcoming collection of county court records.
County court petitions offer a remarkably rich and diverse documentary record concerning race and slavery. They reveal, as do few other primary sources, a local perspective of the South's "Peculiar Institution." They also tell us about the conflicts inherent in a system of human bondage, and especially about the struggles of women and children- both slave and free- who found themselves facing seemingly insurmountable difficulties.
Scholars and informed citizens have rarely used these records. In fact, some of the documents are in the same ribbon-tied packets in which they were placed a century and a half ago! The quantity and quality of this documentation is remarkable. These documents provide data that expand our knowledge in several research areas, including rare biographical and genealogical information about people of color; how slaves, as chattel, could and often did find themselves sold, conveyed, or distributed as part of their masters' estates; the impact of market forces on the slave family; and how slaves in some states could and did bring suits for their freedom. The guardianship and emancipation petitions present a vivid picture of the association between whites and free blacks, and the divorce petitions provide a new picture of slaveholding white women.
These documents give a unique view of the workings of local court systems: who approached the courts and why; how they fared; how their pleas varied in different states and locales during different time periods; and how judges and juries responded to their pleas. They illuminate, in unexpected ways, intellectual history and religious experience, and contain references to debates over theology, ethics, law, social theory, and epistemology that occurred outside traditional academic, religious, and cultural institutions.
The value of these documents to scholars, students, and general readers of the humanities cannot be overemphasized. They reveal not only what southerners were saying, but also what they were doing; not only what happened to slaves, but how slaves responded to their condition. They show how complex political, economic, legal, social, and cultural conditions affected the lives of all southerners, black and white, female and male, slave and free. In seeking to understand the impact of slavery on the people of the South, perhaps no available primary source offers more topical, geographical, and chronological breadth, or penetrating depth of subject matter.
Loren Schweninger is director and editor of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project.
