Emancipation in the Dock: The Problem of Freedom in the Reconstruction Courtroom

While historians have long been aware of the haphazard and chaotic nature of emancipation in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the machinations of the southern legal system has been understudied. Particularly at the county level–where precedent to say nothing of interwar cases on the docket, which were decided only after the Civil War ended–together make the southern courtroom an important site of contest. What this paper examines are the many ways in which wartime battles over the terms of emancipation carried on in southern courts: battles in which former slaves displayed a canny awareness of not only the politics but the minutiae of the legal system. This paper contributes to the work of historians like Christopher Waldrep and Laura Edwards, while at the same time staking out new ground by using the literature on the ‘second slavery’ to question the paradigm of freedom in the Reconstruction literature.