“The Marriage Covenant is at the Foundation of all Our Rights”: The Politics of Slave Marriages in North Carolina after Emancipation

Law and History Review

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 81-124

  Edwards, Laura F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85009675575     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: 19399022     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/827614     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Journal of the Convention of the State of North Carolina at its Session of 1865 (Raleigh, 1865), 7. The speech was not only well received but widely complimented. See, for instance, Raleigh Journal of Freedom, 21 October 1865, article reprinted from the Baltimore American.
2. Journal of Freedom, 1 October 1865. Roberta Sue Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen: Race Relations During Presidential Reconstruction, 1865-67 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 24-27; Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 124-25; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 112-19. For eyewitness descriptions of the convention, see Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 119-31; John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is, 1865-1866 (New York: Viking Press, 1965; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 148-54.
3. For theoretical discussions of the social and political importance of households, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Linda Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). For the South in particular, see Peter Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); id., “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1245-64; id., “The Politics of Yeoman Households in South Carolina,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, eds. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 22-38; James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
4. Quoted in Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 99. Also see Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 470-72.
5. For the importance of marriage to a wide range of social relations, see Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household; Nancy F. Cott, “Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in U.S. History as Women's History, eds. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 107-21; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth; Linda K. Kerber, “The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805,” American Historical Review 97 (April 1992): 349-78; Joan Hoff Wilson, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991).
6. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868).
7. For biographical background on Edwin Reade, see William S. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979-), 5: 183-84.
8. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868). For the position of the antebellum North Carolina supreme court on wife beating, see Bynum, Unruly Women, 70-72; Wyatt-Brown, Southem Honor, 281-83. Also see Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988); Elizabeth Pleck, “Wife Beating in Nineteenth-Century America,” Victimology 4, no. 1 (1979): 60-74; Jerome Nadelhaft, “Wife Torture: A Known Phenomenon in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American Culture 10 (Fall 1987): 39-59; Wilson, Law, Gender, and Injustice.
9. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868). Also see Joynerv. Joyner, 59 N.C. 331 (1862); White v. White, 84 N.C. 340 (1881).
10. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868).
11. Although the court later repudiated a husband's right to physically chastise his wife and increased its own powers to intervene in the domestic sphere, it still upheld the separation of private from public established in Rhodes. See State v. Ridley Mabrey, 64 N.C. 592 (1870); State v. Richard Oliver, 70 N.C. 60 (1874); State v. Laura Davidson, 11 N.C. 522 (1877); State v. Simpson Pettie, 80 N.C. 367 (1879); State v. Fred Jones 95 N.C. 588 (1886). Although they did not directly cite Rhodes, other cases supported it in principle. See Mar tin Home v. Mary E. Home, 72 N.C. 530 (1875); Mary A. Miller v. John C. Miller, 78 N.C. 102 (1878); Andrew Syme, Adm'r. v. William D. Riddle, 88 N.C. 463 (1883); State v. Joseph Huntley, 91 N.C. 617 (1884); State v. J.T. Edens, 95 N.C. 693 (1886).
12. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868). Hendrik Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations in Nineteenth Century America,” Georgetown Law Journal 80 (October 1991): 95-129, also emphasizes the courts’ conception of marriage as a public relationship. Nonetheless, the courts were reluctant to interfere in the dynamics of that relationship. Keller, Affairs of State, 467-68.
13. State\. Wesley Hairston and Puss Williams, 63 N.C.451 (1869). For a discussion of the court's regulation of “fit” marital unions in the U.S. as a whole, see Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 103-52.
14. Chaplain of a Louisiana black regiment to the regimental adjutant, quoted in Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 2, The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 624. See For a discussion of the court's regulation of “fit” marital unions in the U.S. as a whole., 623 for reference to Special Order 15, which provided for the legalization of slave marriages; for a discussion of marriage, see 660-61. Also see Foner, Reconstruction, 84.
15. For the eagerness of conservative legislators to legalize slave unions, see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 47-48; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 133.
16. Sentinel, 8August 1865; 31 January 1866. Also see Dennett, The South As It Is, 164-65; Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 47-48.
17. These positions emerged most stridently in the debate over the right of freedpeople to testify in court; see Sentinel, 1, 2, 9, 22, and 27 February 1866. For further elaboration of the conciliatory view, see, for instance, Alfred M. Waddell's “Advice to Freedmen,” 8 August 1865; untitled editorial on the status of freedpeople, 21 August 1865; report of the committee, headed by John Pool, that considered the status of freedpeople and advised the appointment of an independent commission to make further recommendations on the matter, 12 October 1865; all in the Sentinel. For the opposing position, see, for instance, “Views of the Late Senator Douglas on the Negro as a Voter,” Sentinel, 15 August 1865. Also see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 40-41; Dennett, The South As It Is, 162-65.
18. Slaveholders made the same claims about slaves; see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 482-83.
19. State v. Young Harris, 63 N.C. 1 (1868).
20. Sentinel, 29 August 1865. This position was also written into the recommendations of the commission, headed by Moore, that drew up the draft of the state's Black Code; see Sentinel, 31 January 1866. Alfred M. Waddell made the same point about marriage in his August 1865 address to freedpeople in Wilmington: “The law will compel you to observe the duties incident to this relation and for any violation of them you will be punished as white people are punished.” See Sentinel, 8 August 1865.
21. Report of the committee, headed by John Pool, that considered the status of freedpeople and advised the appointment of an independent commission to make further recommendations on the matter, Sentinel, 12 October 1865.
22. Frances Howard v. Sarah Howard, etal, 51 N.C. 235 (1858). For discussions on the ideological importance of the denial of legal marriage to slaves for southern society as a whole, see Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 32, 52-53; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 129-32; Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, xvi-xvii, 3-39.
23. Sentinel, 29 August 1865. Also see Escott, Many Excellent People, 126-27; Hamilton, A History of North Carolina, 3: 66, 75, 110-11; 4: 13.
24. Public Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at the Session of 1866, chapter 40, section 7. Also see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 47-48; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 417-18.
25. Quoted in Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 45.
26. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 112-19; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 1392; Foner, Reconstruction, 201-2; Rebecca Scott, “The Battle over the Child: Child Apprenticeship and the Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina.” Prologue 10 (Summer 1978): 101-13.
27. White resistance to African Americans attempting to reunite their families emphasizes this point; see Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 383-85.
28. For this point, see Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 79-107; John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 58-120.
29. Foner, Reconstruction, 82-84; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 204-7; Tera W. Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making: Afro-American Women in Atlanta and the New South, 1861 to 1920,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1990, 6-58; Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 3-63, 229-47. Questioning the conventional assumption that the North freed the slaves, recent historians have emphasized the active participation of African Americans and the various ways in which they worked to secure their own emancipation: Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience; Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 100-130; Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making,” 21-23; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 108-35; Leslie Ann Schwalm, “The Meaning of Freedom: African-American Women and Their Transition from Slavery to Freedom in Lowcountry South Carolina,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1991, 123-81.
30. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 133, makes a similar point about freedpeople using legal marriage “to fortify their domestic relationships with as many legal protections as possible.” The literature on the importance of family ties to slaves and freedpeople is vast. For example, see Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 656-61; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom; Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
31. New York Tribune, 8 September 1865.
32. New York Tribune, 8 September 1865. Lumberton minister quoted in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 620n. 35. For similar comments among whites, see Andrews, The South Since the War, 178-79; Dennett, The South As It Is, 164-65. Also see Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 241.
33. Quoted in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 672. Jim Cullen, “Ts a Man Now': Gender and African American Men,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, 76-91, is also suggestive on this point.
34. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 112-19; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 13942; Foner, Reconstruction, 201; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 402-12; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 153-55; Scott, “The Battle over the Child.”
35. North Carolina Standard, 10 October 1866. Also see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 11.
36. D. A. Yarbrough to H. W. Jones, 3 April 1867, Henry W. Jones Papers, Special Collections Library, Duke University.
37. Daniel A. Paschall to Major General Miles, 17 September 1867, Letters Received, Assistant Commissioner's Records, BRFAL, North Carolina. Dick Hester v. William S. Hester, November 1867, Apprentice Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH.
38. Coleman Edward to the Freedmen's Bureau, 31 July 1866, Letters Received, Assistant Superintendent, Oxford, North Carolina, BRFAL, RG 105.
39. Bynum, “On the Lowest Rung” and Unruly Women, 103-9. Also see Barbara Bellows, “'My Children, Gentlemen, Are My Own': Poor Women, the Urban Elite, and the Bonds of Obligation in Antebellum Charleston,” in The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education, eds. Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 52-71.
40. Quoted in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 411.
41. Kate Durham v. H. H. Rowland, August 1866 and September 1866; Sally Hicks v. Samuel R. Hunt and James P. Hunt, February 1868, Apprentice Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH. As Herbert Gutman argues in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 409-10, freedwomen in Maryland also couched their demands for their children in terms of their relationship to a competent male household head. Also see Berlin, Miller, and Rowland, eds., “Afro-American Families,” 116-18; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 154-55.
42. Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations,” makes a similar point for the nineteenth century as a whole, noting the disjuncture between individuals’ conceptions of marriage and legal definitions. There was, as he argues, a widespread understanding of marriage as an unequal relationship between a husband and wife, in which both parties assumed certain obligations. But the actual operation of that relationship varied widely among individuals and, as I am suggesting here, across race and class as well. Many African-American leaders were quite aware that white northerners and southerners alike used marriage as a barometer of their people's fitness for freedom, and they urged blacks to adopt the domestic patterns common among wealthier whites. This, they argued, would help convince the nation that exslaves deserved the rights and privileges of freedom. See Foner, Reconstruction, 87; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
43. Quoted in Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 1, vol. 2, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 859. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 415-16. Of course, Gutman's figure is really a “guesstimate.” Comparing registered unions to the entire slave population aged twenty and older presumes that all these people would be married and thus grossly underestimates the percentage of heterosexual couples who formalized their vows. Moreover, there is no way of knowing whether or not existing records are complete. Still, the estimate suggests that many freedpeople did not rush to legalize their marriages, as Gutman himself argues. For the reluctance of freedpeople to marry legally, see Noralee Frankel, “Freedom's Women: African-American Women in Mississippi, 1860-1870,” unpublished manuscript; Schwalm, “The Meaning of Freedom,” 340-44. Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg, 103-11, also notes similar reservations among free black women in the antebellum period.
44. For typical cases of bastardy in one North Carolina county, see Bastardy Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH. The Granville County court records are also filled with fornication and adultery cases, involving both whites and African Americans. The sheer number as well as the repeat offenders suggests that many of these people were involved in longterm relationships. There were fifty-three such cases from 1870 to 1886; see Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NCDAH. The Criminal Action Papers in Orange and Edgecombe Counties yielded similar patterns.
45. Torchlight, 20 January 1885, 2 February 1886, 11 January, 15 February 1887; also see 19 April 1887.
46. My analysis relies heavily on Noralee Frankel's conceptualization of African-American marital relations in “Freedom's Women.” Quotes from Jacob Moore, 14th Regiment, Company A, U.S. Colored Troops, Heavy Artillery; Irvin Thompson alias Cherry Thompson, 37th Regiment, Company K, U.S. Colored Troops, Infantry; both in Pension Records, RG 15, National Archives. Pension records provide an excellent source for the construction of marriage within black communities because widows had to establish the legitimacy of their relationships to claim a pension. Most of the testimony comes from eastern North Carolina, which was occupied early by Union troops. But pension records from other parts of the South are similar, suggesting that these attitudes were widespread. Although she does not draw the same conclusions as Frankel, Schwalm's discussion of African-American families is also suggestive; see “The Meaning of Freedon,” 87-90, 3359. Also see Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 24314. For parallels between African Americans and nineteenthcentury attitudes as a whole, see Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations.”
47. Smith Watkins v. Dink Watkins, Fall Term 1876; E. B. Bullock v. Jane Bullock, Fall Term 1876; both in Divorce Records, Granville County, NCDAH. Bigamy cases suggest the same attitude. See: State v. Nash Williams, indictment, 1875; State v. Hinton Jordan, indictment, 1877; State v. Robert Speed, indictment, 1878; State v. Jordan Thorp, indictment, 1878; State v. William Newman, indictment, 1878; State v. Samuel Harris, indictment, l%79; State v. Stephen Blain, complaint and testimony, 1882; all in Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NCDAH.
48. For a particularly dramatic example, see Child Custody Case of Alphonso Royster, Jr., 1894, Miscellaneous Records, Granville County, NCDAH. Also see Martha E. Satterwhite v. William L. Satterwhite, 8 February 1871; Susan Ann Satterwhite v. James A. Satterwhite, 17 September 1859; both in Divorce Records, Granville County, NCDAH. Also see Censer, “‘Smiling Through Her Tears’”; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 2AA-A1, 283-91.
49. Frankel, “Freedom's Women”; also see White Ar'n't I a Woman?, 156-57. Testimony in the Pension Records, as well as the increase in legal divorces among blacks during the late nineteenth century in North Carolina, also suggests that many African Americans moved closer within the orbit of legal marriage as the century progressed. On the increase in divorce, see Bynum, “Reshaping the Bonds of Womanhood.”
50. Frankel, “Freedom's Women,” points out that federal pension examiners had an equally difficult time comprehending the structure of black families in Mississippi. For the importance of extended family ties, see Berlin, Miller, and Rowland, eds., “Afro-American Families”; Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 237-38, 263-64, 274-79; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 156; Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making,” 34-38; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Schwalm, “The Meaning of Freedom,” 87-90, 335-49. Although emphasizing the importance of male-headed, nuclear families, Gutman in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom also gives evidence for the importance of extended families. Coleman Edward to the Freedmen's Bureau, 31 July 1866; William Jones to A. G. Brady (regarding the complaint of James Malone) 5 July 1866; Wesley Mayfield to William Jones, 11 May 1866; Letters Received, Assistant Superintendent, Oxford, North Carolina, BRFAL, RG 105. Also see John Washington to Col. Bumsford, 11 September 1867, Assistant Commissioner's Records, BRFAL, North Carolina.
51. State v. Frances Thorp, 1875, Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NCDAH. It is unclear whether or not Peter Thompson and his wife were related to Frances Thorp or whether she just referred to them as aunt and uncle. Either alternative, however, supports the importance of an extended family, not based on marriage contracts.
52. Biography of Edward Isham alias Hardaway Bone in the Notebook of David Schenck, David Schenck Papers, NCDAH; Eliza Bell v. John A. Bell, 1871, Divorce Records, Granville County, NCDAH; Eliza filed her first complaint in 1866 but had to wait several years to legally prove abandonment. Also see Micajah Lancaster v. Unnamed, 1866, Divorce Records, Granville County, NCDAH. In 1835 William Hines also emphasized his wife's fulfillment of her domestic obligations as the underpinning of the marriage when he filed for divorce on the tenuous legal grounds that his wife “utterly neglected to attend to the well management of the kitchen & household affairs and other duties incident to a married woman.” Quoted in Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 144. For Edward Isham, also see Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 1-10; Scott P. Culclasure,” ‘I Have Killed a Damned Dog': Murder by a Poor White in the Antebellum South,” North Carolina Historical Review 70 (January 1993): 13-39.
53. Benjamin Braddy, Regiment 1, Company F, North Carolina Infantry, Pension Records, RG 15. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 75-81; Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations.” The court recognized common-law marriages after the war. See G. P. H. Jones and others v. N. J. Reddick and others, 79 N.C. 290 (1878).
54. State v. Eli Jacobs, 1880, Criminal Action Papers, Orange County NCDAH. In addition to informal mediation by family and neighbors (who were often kin as well), local church congregations also adjudicated family conflicts. Also see Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites 133, 156-64; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 171-207. For similar patterns in the urban Northeast, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
55. In the Matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Moore, 61 N.C. 91 (1867).
56. Public Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at the Session of 1866-67 (Raleigh, 1867), chapter 6, 10-11. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 50-51.
57. Escott, Many Excellent People; Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Horace W. Raper, William W. Holden: North Carolina's Political Enigma (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). For a blow-by-blow account of the factionalism that developed among North Carolina's white leaders in 1866 and 1867, see Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 3: 176-92. For a revealing portrait of an elite white Republican in Alabama, see William Warren Rogers, Jr., Black Belt Scalawag: Charles Hays and the Southern Republicans in the Era of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).
58. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868).
59. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen; William McKee Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); Escott, Many Excellent People. Also see Edwards L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Bynum, “On the Lowest Rung”; Foner, Nothing But Freedom; Donald G. Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice: Washington County, Texas, 1868-1884,” Journal of Southern History 55 (August 1989): 391120.
60. N.C. 307 (1872). The system, however, lingered in North Carolina and in other parts of the South. See, in particular, Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 153-56; Fields, however, maintains that the system continued in a truncated form. In the 1890s it resurfaced again in North Carolina with the “discovery” of the widespread abuse of apprentices by their masters, who worked their charges for their own profit with no thought to the children's well-being. The situation, however, was different from that during the years following emancipation. Although the apprentices were black and badly treated, they were no longer taken from parents to be apprenticed to more “suitable” guardians. See Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of North Carolina for the Year 1888 (Raleigh, 1888), 211-35.
61. Sarah E. Taylor v. David Taylor, 76 N.C. 433 (1877); In the Matter of Frank Bumpass and Ella Lumsford, Matt Lumsford, and Rosa Lumsford, 1881, Apprentice Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH.
62. Sarah E. Taylor v. David Taylor, 76 N.C. 433 (1877).
63. State v. Alexander Neely, 74 N.C. 425 (1876).
64. State v. Alexander Neely. The state supreme court later stepped back from this extreme stance and overturned Neely in State v. James Massey, 86 N.C. 658 (1882). The following year, however, the court returned to a position close to that of Neely in State v. Wiley Mitchell 89 N.C. 521 (1883). Both Massey and Mitchell, moreover, suggest the extent to which the lower courts determined cases according to the principle set out in Neely.