9 On the strong link between race and the law, see, e.g., Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell. The vision of law as a continuous struggle over meaning has been given powerful expression by, among others, Sally Falk Moore, Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review (1985), p. 899; and Robert W. Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” Stanford Law Review 36 (1984), p. 57.
10 For a thorough introduction to “racial identity trials,” see Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell. For evidentiary rulings that required proof of “pure African blood,” see, e.g., Ferrall v. Ferrall, 69 S.E. 60, 61-62 (N.C. 1910); and Daniel J. Sharfstein, “The Secret History of Race in the United States,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003), pp. 1473, 1502-3, 1506.
11 See Robert M. Cover, “Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1983), p. 4.
CHAPTER 1: GIBSON: MARS BLUFF, SOUTH CAROLINA, 1768
1 George Gabriel Powell to William Bull, August 19, 1768, in South Carolina Council Journal, August 26, 1768, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (hereafter SCDAH), Columbia. The description of the physical setting is based on the Reverend Charles Woodmason’s diaries of his travels in the Pee Dee area and elsewhere in the South Carolina backcountry in the mid-1760s. See Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, ed. Richard J. Hooker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
2 See Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 56; George C. Rogers Jr., The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 63, 105; Suzanne Cameron Linder and Marta Leslie Thacker, Historical Atlas of the Rice Plantations of Georgetown County and the Santee River (Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 2001), pp. 281-83; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 172-73; and Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 69-71.
3 Brown, South Carolina Regulators, p. 55; Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, pp. 7, 13, 15, 18, 25, 31, 52; and South Carolina Gazette, August 15, 1768. Accompanying Powell on the journey upcountry was Roger Pinckney, South Carolina’s highest law enforcement official, the deputy provost marshal.
4 Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 56-57.
5 Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768; Jordan, White Over Black, p. 172; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, p. 192n8; Klein, Unification, p. 69; Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729-1765 (Kingsport, Tenn.: Southern Publishers, 1940), pp. 90, 96; Alexander Gregg, History of the Old Cheraws (1867; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: State Co., 1905), pp. 73-74; Paul Heinegg, “Gibson Family,” in Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, online at http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/Gibson_Gowen.htm; and Supplement to South Carolina and American General Gazette, April 18, 1764, transcript available from South Carolina Newspaper Collection, Accessible Archives.
6 Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 1-12; Klein, Unification, pp. 37-38.
7 Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 29-37; Klein, Unification, pp. 57-60; “America,” St. James’s Chronicle or, The British Evening Post, October 25-27, 1768, p. 3.
8 Woodmason, “The Remonstrance,” in Carolina Backcountry, pp. 213, 226; “America,” St. James’s Chronicle, October 25-27, 1768; Klein, Unification, pp. 63, 68; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 41-43, 70-73; Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Royal Government, 1719-1776 (New York: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 627-34; and Richard Cumberland to Roger Pinckney, July 31, 1765, in Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, ed. Plowden Charles Jennett Weston (London, 1856), p. 115. King George had awarded the offices of Provost Marshal, Clerk of the Peace, and Clerk of the Crown to Richard Cumberland, a well-born civil servant just beginning a career as a London playwright, who in turn leased the office to Roger Pinckney, another Londoner seeking his fortune. From London, Cumberland resisted efforts to end his monopoly on legal process in South Carolina.
9 Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 38-39, 40, 45-46, 49; Klein, Unification, p. 47; “America,” St. James’s Chronicle, October 25-27, 1768.
10 South Carolina Gazette, August 15, 1768; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, p. 54; “America,” St. James’s Chronicle, October 25-27, 1768.
11 Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 54-55; George Lloyd Johnson, The Frontier in the Colonial South: South Carolina Backcountry, 1736-1800 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 56, 135n47; Robert Weaver v. Gideon Gibson (1764), judgment roll, SCDAH.
12 The account that follows is drawn primarily from a petition one of the militiamen presented to the colonial legislature two years after the events at Mars Bluff: Petition of William White, Commons House Journal, August 15, 1770, SCDAH. See also Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 54-58; Johnson, Frontier in Colonial South, pp. 122-26; Jordan, White Over Black, p. 173; Klein, Unification, pp. 69-71; and South Carolina Gazette, August 15, 1768.
13 Petition of William White.
14 Ibid.
15 South Carolina Gazette, August 15, 1768; Petition of William White; “A Proclamation,” South Carolina Gazette, August 8, 1768; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, p. 58.
16 Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768.
17 Ibid.; Philip Gosse, St. Helena, 1502-1938 (Shropshire, U.K.: Anthony Nelson, 1938), pp. 181-82; Extracts from the St. Helena Records, comp. Hudson Ralph Janisch (St. Helena, 1908), pp. 136, 181-83; A. S. Salley, ed., “Diary of William Dillwyn During a Visit to Charles Town in 1772,” South Carolina History and General Magazine 36 (1935), pp. 29, 34-35; Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, p. 270.
18 Extracts from St. Helena Records, pp. 74, 183; Gosse, St. Helena, p. 182.
19 See generally Jordan, White Over Black; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 29-46; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 134-35, 185-86; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 109-16, 223-25.
20 Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 212-41; Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 43-49; Heinegg, introduction to Free African Americans, online at http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/introduction.htm; Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860,” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007), pp. 592, 604-5, 614-16.
21 Brown, Good Wives, pp. 213-22; Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 7-9.
22 Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line,” p. 616; Heinegg, introduction to Free African Americans ; Jordan, White Over Black, pp. 171-72; Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 97-101.
23 Wood, Black Majority, pp. 150, 220-21; “Extracts of Mr. Von Reck’s Journal,” in Peter Force, Tracts and Other Papers Principally Relating to the Origin, Settlement and Progress of the North American Colonies (Washington, D.C., 1846), p. 4:9; Jordan, White Over Black, p. 172.
24 Jordan, White Over Black, p. 172.
25 Klein, Unification, pp. 11, 44; Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, pp. 90-91; Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 25-26; Gregg, History of Old Cheraws, p. 67.
26 Robert Mills, Stat
istics of South Carolina (Charleston: Hurlbut and Lloyd, 1826), p. 625; Michael Trinkley and Natalie Adams, Archaeological, Historical, and Architectural Survey of the Gibson Plantation Tract, Florence County, South Carolina (Columbia: Chicora Foundation, 1992), pp. 22-24; Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, p. 94; Amelia Wallace Vernon, African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), p. 125; Wood, Black Majority, p. 324; Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, p. 228.
27 Klein, Unification, pp. 62-63, 71; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 31-32.
28 Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 56-57.
29 Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Jordan, White Over Black, p. 173; Henry Laurens to William Drayton, February 23, 1783, Papers of Henry Laurens, ed. Philip M. Hamer et al. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 16:155-56; Wood, Black Majority, p. 324; An Act of the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province, May 10, 1740, in Statutes at Large of South Carolina, ed. David J. McCord (Columbia: A. S. Johnston, 1840), sec. 56, pp. 7:416-17.
33 Heinegg, introduction to Free African Americans; Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 12-16.
34 Laurens to Drayton, pp. 16:155-56.
35 Brown, South Carolina Regulators, pp. 96-104; Klein, Unification, pp. 74-77; McCrady, History of South Carolina, pp. 638-43, 716.
36 Klein, Unification, pp. 78-108. In 1867 Gregg, in History of Old Cheraws, reported that Gibson was murdered for his Tory sympathies during the Revolution, but there is no independent corroboration of the anecdote.
CHAPTER TWO: WALL: ROCKINGHAM, NORTH CAROLINA, 1838
1 See, e.g., Emory Washburn, A Treatise on the American Law of Real Property (Boston: Little Brown, 1860-62), pp. 2:451-53.
2 Thomas Jefferson to John Randolph, August 25, 1775, in Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies: From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Boston: Gray & Bowen, 1829), pp. 150, 151; Washburn, Treatise on American Law, pp. 2:452-53.
3 State Board of Agriculture, North Carolina and its Resources (Winston, N.C.: M. I. & J. C. Stewart, 1896), pp. 304, 388. Wall v. Wall, 55 S.E. 283 (N.C. 1906), contains a discussion of Stephen Wall’s landholdings.
4 Anne Wall Thomas, The Walls of Walltown (1969; reprint by author), pp. 21-25, 31-33; Wall v. Wall, 55 S.E. 283; “General Assembly: In the Senate,” Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, December 22, 1820; classified advertisement, Carolina Observer, June 19, 1832 (Wall was a commissioner for the Cape Fear & Yadkin Railroad); “Communications,” Fayetteville Observer, July 29, 1834 (on the internal improvement committee of Richmond County); and classified advertisement, Raleigh Register, February 14, 1837 (on Raleigh & Columbia Railroad stock). On the Whig Party generally and in the South, see Arthur C. Cole, The Whig Party in the South (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1914); and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 431. On Wall’s involvement in the party, see “Communications,” Fayetteville Observer, June 12, 1839; he was a delegate at a meeting that declared the Van Buren administration “corrupt and tyrannical.” See also “Communications,” Fayetteville Observer, April 24, 1839; Fayetteville Observer, March 17, 1836; and “District Convention,” Raleigh Register, May 10, 1836.
5 Fayetteville Observer, October 8, 1845. This description is based on a photograph of Wall in Dean Papers.
6 Thomas, Walls of Walltown, p. 32; Fayetteville Observer, October 8, 1845.
7 Early Accounts of Stephen Wall, Leak and Wall Papers; William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1989), pp. 250, 273n27; and Mial Wall to Caroline Wall, March 16, 1853, Langston Papers. See also miscellaneous documents relating to the estate of Sara K. Fidler in Langston Papers. On Caroline Matilda of Denmark, see C. F. Lascelles Wraxall, Life and Times of Her Majesty Caroline Matilda (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1864).
8 See John C. Inscoe, “Carolina Slave Names: An Index to Acculturation,” Journal of Southern History 49 (1983), pp. 527, 541-43; Simón Bolívar, “The Angostura Address” (February 15, 1819), in El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar, ed. David Bushnell, trans. Frederick H. Fornoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 31, 38.
9 See Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Random House, 1974); John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943, 1995); Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), p. 14; Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 1, 4-5.
10 Ira Berlin has referred to this migration as the “Second Middle Passage” in Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 161-230. See also Steven F. Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt, 1815-1840,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), p. 155; Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 10-58.
11 Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, pp. 188-91, 368-72; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, pp. 403, 451-52; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Abolitionists’ Postal Campaign of 1835,” Journal of Negro History 50 (1965), pp. 227-38. In 1836 the House of Representatives responded to the overwhelming number of petitions by banning floor debates on them, a “gag rule” that lasted until 1844.
12 See, e.g., George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971; New York: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 43-96.
13 Early Accounts of Stephen Wall, Leak and Wall Papers.
14 See Berlin, Generations of Captivity, pp. 214-20.
15 Early Accounts of Stephen Wall, Leak and Wall Papers; Berlin, Generations of Captivity, pp. 174-75.
16 Early Accounts of Stephen Wall, Leak and Wall Papers. Gunter is likely Charles Grandison Gunter, who was originally from North Carolina and was married to a Richmond County woman. See Thomas McAdory Owen III, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1921), pp. 715-16. Gunter had a large plantation on Pintlala Creek ten miles west of Montgomery. According to the slave schedules for the 1850 U.S. Census, he owned eighty-one slaves, ages one to ninety. Instrumental in enacting Alabama’s married women’s property law, Gunter served as a captain in the Confederate army during the Civil War and afterward moved to Brazil rather than take an oath of allegiance to the Union. See also Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization,” p. 157; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, pp. 439-45; and Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
17 Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization,” p. 157; Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 172.
18 Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization,” p. 159; Berlin, Generations of Captivity, pp. 176-77.
19 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, pp. 176-77, 188-93; William E. Wiethoff, Crafting the Overseer’s Image (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); William K. Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966).
20 See Berlin, Generations of Captivity, pp. 214-20.
21 Thomas, Walls of Walltown, pp. 30-31.
22 For details on a typical journey west, see Miller, “Plantation Labor Org
anization”; Berlin, Generations of Captivity.
23 Will of Stephen Wall, June 23, 1845, North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh; “Friends in Indiana,” Liberator, November 30, 1838, p. 190.
24 “Friends in Indiana,” Liberator, November 30, 1838, p. 190; John T. Plummer, “Suburban Geology, or Rocks, Soil, and Water, about Richmond, Wayne County, Indiana,” American Journal of Science and the Arts 44 (1843), pp. 281, 283; Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1880), pp. 76-77, 106-07.
25 “Friends in Indiana,” Liberator, November 30, 1838, p. 190; The Discipline of the Society of Friends, of Indiana Yearly Meeting (Cincinnati: A. Pugh, 1839), pp. 60-61.
26 Coffin, Reminiscences, pp. 106-10; Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 20, 48-49; “Friends in Indiana,” Liberator, November 30, 1838, p. 190; Discipline of Society of Friends.
27 “Friends in Indiana,” Liberator, November 30, 1838, p. 190.
28 Ibid.; see also 1840 U.S. Census, Kemper County, Miss.
29 Willard J. Wright, ed., “The Story of Warren County,” in Memoirs of the Miami River Valley, ed. John Calvin Hover et al. (Chicago: Robert O. Law Co., 1919), pp. 2:247, 420.
30 A. W. Brayton, “A Sketch of the Life of the Late Dr. Thomas B. Harvey, of Indianapolis, Indiana,” Medical Mirror 1 (1890), p. 76.
31 Coffin, Reminiscences, p. 581; Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, p. 250.
32 Will of Stephen Wall, North Carolina State Archives.
33 Ibid.; Mial Wall to Caroline Wall, March 16, 1853, Langston Papers.
CHAPTER THREE: SPENCER: CLAY COUNTY, KENTUCKY, 1848
The Invisible Line Page 40