“Only a Moral Power”: African Americans, Reformers, and the Repeal of Ohio’s Black Laws

Barnes, L. Diane

doi:10.1353/ohh.2017.0002

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…114 These conflicts, which failed to spark significant interest in the newspapers, are consonant with contemporaneous advocacy in other states to allow free Black testimony, both from Northern supporters of Black rights, who opposed the proscription on Black testimony against whites because of racism, and from Southern slaveholders, who despite supporting the racial hierarchy, supported "the general admission of negro testimony, on the ground that the general tendency and reformatory progress of our laws were to admit all testimony, leaving the question of credibility entirely to the jury." 115 Only the Civil War and Reconstruction would settle the questions of Black testimony and citizenship in Maryland.…”

Section: Marylandmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South

Eisner

2023

Law hist. rev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While every slave state except Louisiana limited free Black testimony in cases involving whites, and most barred it completely, several jurisdictions with slavery, including three in the Upper South—Delaware, Maryland, and D.C.—allowed at least some free Black testimony in cases involving whites at least some of the time. Historians and legal scholars have largely overlooked the phenomenon of free Black testimony in the South, outside of Louisiana. In this article, I argue that courts in the Upper South allowed some free Black testimony in cases involving whites in part because allowing (limited) Black testimony enabled courts to access the truth (slightly) more freely, thereby increasing the law's legitimacy. The exceptions to the general bar against Black testimony in cases involving whites also demonstrate the diversity of legal trends in the antebellum Upper South. In Maryland, the space for free Black testimony shrank. In D.C. and Delaware, it grew. But Southerners long contested the relationship between race and law. Competing pressures to administer a well-functioning legal system and to maintain racial hierarchy exerted force on the white elite. Southern elites, even before the great convulsion of the Civil War, sometimes divided on how best to administer a white supremacist legal regime.

show abstract

Section: Marylandmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South

Eisner

2023

Law hist. rev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“Only a Moral Power”: African Americans, Reformers, and the Repeal of Ohio’s Black Laws

Cited by 1 publication

References 2 publications

Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South

Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About