Troubling Justice: Women and the Criminal Courts in the American South, 1865-1900

Abstract

This dissertation examines Black and White women’s experiences as complainants and defendants in South Carolina’s county-level criminal courts between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on more than 1,500 archival court records, it focuses on how women’s active roles in the criminal courts of post-Civil War South Carolina alter our narratives about the nineteenth-century U.S. South, the history of race, gender, and incarceration, and women’s relationship to the law. Specifically, “Troubling Justice” troubles the traditional narrative of a rapid and inevitable transition between slavery and mass incarceration for African Americans in the South. I argue that local sources demonstrate a more complicated picture. Freedwomen, despite their recent history of legal enslavement, used magistrate hearings and the criminal courts to resolve conflicts, negotiate for change, and call the powerful to account. Even after the fall of Reconstruction, racist statutes in the courts never went uncontested by African Americans and their White political allies, or by ordinary women who sought to use the law to protect themselves and their families. The case files of women on trial, too, demonstrate that despite their disadvantages, these defendants marshaled their resources, social networks, legal knowledge, and understanding of their society to defend themselves using both legal and extralegal strategies. Reading local nineteenth-century court records enables us to hear women’s voices more clearly than scholarship based on appellate court decisions or incarceration records alone. Hearing them not only complicates our stories about race, gender, and criminal law in the post-Civil War South, but helps us see women in the nineteenth-century southern criminal justice system not as passive subjects of a hegemonic legal system, but as resourceful and resilient actors.