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Book Review
| Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. $49.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8071-2862-7); $19.95 paper (ISBN 0-8071-2880-5).
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| Judith Kelleher Schafer has written an informative history of slave manumissions in New Orleans, using recently discovered archival materials: minute books and trial transcripts from the district courts of New Orleans from 1846–1862. The constitution of 1845 authorized the founding of the courts and the legislature created them in 1846. These courts were operational until the city fell to the Union in 1862 and the issue of slaves' freedom in New Orleans became moot upon the Emancipation Proclamation of 1864. Except for those cases where an appeal was taken to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, none of them have appeared in published court reports. |
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Schafer's study covers a key period in New Orleans history: the antebellum years during the national slavery crisis. This period is significant, insofar as Louisiana had a more liberal position with respect to manumission and the rights of free blacks. But with abolitionism pressing from the North, and with the arrival of larger numbers of free and runaway blacks seeking to participate in the vibrant economy, whites became panicked. Free blacks threatened white superiority and undermined the notion that slavery was beneficial to blacks. Free of white control, they provided a dangerous example and inspired slaves to become discontent with their status. |
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The story of Louisiana manumission law in this period reflects the schizophrenic attitude that whites in the state had toward free blacks. The Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 granted slaves a unique right, not offered by any other slave state, to contract for their freedom and initiate lawsuits to gain their liberty. Slave owners could also free their slaves by will, and all free blacks who entered the state prior to 1825 were required to register their free status. Five years later, the legislature decided that all free persons who entered the state after 1825 had to leave within 60 days or face imprisonment at hard labor. An owner who freed a slave was obligated to provide a $1,000 bond that she would leave the state within one month of manumission. Nonetheless, the legislature decided in 1831 that parish police juries could permit newly manumitted slaves to remain in the state. Former owners were no longer required to post bond; they need only prove that the former slave provided faithful or important service over a long period of time. Those who left could return, provided they owned property in the state, exercised a trade, and were upstanding. In 1842, these amnesty provisions were extended to those who entered before 1838. But ten years later, the legislature decided that all masters freeing slaves would send them to Liberia. |
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Granting jurisdiction over manumissions to the local courts created opportunities for slaves to exercise agency. Slaves testified and crafted various arguments explaining why they should be free. They claimed that they fulfilled the terms of their freedom contracts, and that their former masters treated them as free people. They pointed to wills written by former masters and proclaimed to all that their behavior prior and subsequent to manumission was impeccable. Juries comprised of people familiar with the local society and its mores decided whether a slave would become a member of the free black New Orleans community. Former slaves were so successful that in 1855 and 1856, no suits for freedom failed. |
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Notwithstanding a former slave's success in gaining her freedom, that hard-earned status could become illusory in an instant. Former slaves were susceptible to harassment, in that any free black could be accused at any moment of being a slave. A simple dispute over money or services owed to her could result in her opponent making an affirmative defense that she was a slave. She could be charged with being in the state in contravention of the law and deported if found guilty. Police officers and white citizens could arrest and incarcerate her until she could prove her freedom. The executors and debtors of her deceased former owner could seize her, alleging that she was property belonging to the estate. Worst of all, if she fell victim to kidnapping, she had to file a petition to prove her free status. |
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If she failed to prove she was free by birth or by manumission, she became a slave, constrained by all the legal disabilities that followed. If she was married, her marriage ceased to exist. She lost the right to testify in court and enter into contracts. She could no longer own or inherit property. Any children she bore took her slave status. She could be mortgaged as collateral for her owner's debts. |
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Nonetheless, some former slaves sought to re-enslave themselves, once slaves could no longer file petitions for freedom and the status of free blacks became even more precarious. Louisiana fell in line with the strong anti-abolition stand taken by other Southern states. The legislature barred manumissions altogether on the same day the Supreme Court stated in Scott v. Sandford that slaves had no rights under federal constitutional law. Thereafter, no slave in Louisiana could be freed, and those free men and women living in the state without proof of freedom and the right to remain found that they were boxed in. If they did not leave on their own, they could be deported. Taking a risk, they petitioned to become slaves. Relinquishing one's freedom represented a last-ditch attempt to assert agency and prevent the separation from family and community that deportation wrought. |
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| Bernie D. Jones
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| University of Massachusetts-Amherst |
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