In the aftermath of Emancipation and the Civil War, the federal government’s attempts to assist four million formerly enslaved persons coalesced in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Better remembered as the Freedmen’s Bureau, it was established in March 1865 and lasted until November 1872.
The Bureau operated hospitals and refugee camps, supplied food and clothing, helped establish schools, and legalized marriages for those who had been enslaved. Legal scholar Zarchary Newkirk explores a less well-known aspect of the Bureau: federal courts for civil remedies in states whose judiciaries were still dominated by the slave-owning elite of the defeated Confederacy.
Freedmen’s Bureau courts were short-lived forums for the newly emancipated in what Newkirk calls the “uncertain legal landscape” of the defeated Confederacy. Union hopes that the Southern legal system would give freedpeople equal access to justice “ran against centuries of Southern traditions.” The racist oligarchy once known as the Slave Power may have been defeated militarily and deprived of the human property it was based on, but it would nevertheless survive politically and culturally, with one of its main “instruments of oppression” being the law.
Bureau courts show what might have been. One unusually well-documented Bureau court case was Bill, Charles, Jupiter, Randolph, et al. v. William A. Carr, heard in Tallahassee, Florida.
In June 1865, William A. Carr threatened the formerly enslaved on his plantation that if they didn’t sign a work contract most of them couldn’t read, he would throw them off his property. Fifty-six freedpeople, however “wary of signing,” did so, only to have Carr fail to live up this his obligation to pay them at the end of the year. The plaintiffs turned to the new courts for remedy.
“Rather than acquiesce to non-payment,” Newkirk writes,
the laborers transformed their knowledge of an unjust contract into a tangible pursuit of justice—a remedial pathway made possible because of developments in government and in law. Specifically, the freedpeople could seek legal assistance from the power and authority of the United States government.
The Bureau courts “served useful purposes for multiple groups,” Newkirk explains. “Southern disapproval of the Bureau courts may not have been as uniform as previously thought.” White lawyers, after all, got work and earned a living in the courts. Some Southern lawyers may have opposed federal intervention, but Bureau court cases, being federal, “broadened their legal horizons.”
More to Explore
Revisiting Reconstruction
The plaintiffs in this case were represented by Robert B. Hilton, who had served four years in the Confederate Congress. “Very little in this biography indicates any affinity toward the struggles of black people,” writes Newkirk, but Hilton nonetheless seems to have represented the formerly enslaved ably in court. Representing otherwise indigent plaintiffs, he had to win the case to earn his keep. Remarkably, in his brief, Hilton suggested he had at first under-calculated the amounts due his clients because of his own racial bias.
The judge in the case was another Floridian, a former justice of the peace, clerk of the court, and lawyer whose appointment was given the stamp of approval by Tallahassee newspapers. Even Carr, who was represented by two notable members of the Florida bar, didn’t challenge the Bureau Court’s legitimacy until after the judge decided against him in May 1866.
Weekly Newsletter
Carr was found liable for $3,773.50 in payment, plus 6 percent interest since the beginning of the year, and $485.88 in court costs, When Carr refused to pay, military officials threatened to occupy his plantation to enforce the judgement. That’s when Carr’s son paid, evidently ruining his relationship with his father, who called him “ungrateful and unkind” in his will.
Freedmen’s Bureau Courts didn’t survive Reconstruction. The effort to create a multiracial democracy in the South, including equal access to justice, was instead violently overturned by white supremacism. American apartheid in the form of Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, codified unequal application and enforcement of justice for Blacks. In Florida, for instance, the 1865 Constitution barred Blacks from testifying in court against whites. Juries would be completely white there, and many other places in the country, for more than a century.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
