Family Bonds by Ted Maris-Wolf

Author:Ted Maris-Wolf [Maris-Wolf, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469620077
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 23371450
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Petition of Jane Payne, Mary Fletcher, and Annah Gleaves Poters for enslavement, 1861. When Jane Payne, Mary Fletcher, and Annah Gleaves Poters were questioned about their unusual joint petition for re-enslavement, they confessed that none intended to renounce their freedom, regardless of the outcome of the legal proceedings. (Courtesy Library of Virginia, Richmond)

But the plan quickly unraveled. Self-enslavement proceedings under the law of 1861 (as under the previous law of 1856) could be rubberstamped by Virginia’s legal authorities, but frequently they were not. Circuit court judges—men who had been chosen in part for their commitment to supporting the pillars of Virginia’s slaveholding society—might look upon the voluntary enslavement law in two different ways. On the one hand, it offered a practical solution to the plight of those free blacks deemed worthy of remaining in the state. But the law also might threaten the integrity of the institution of slavery if applied irresponsibly, by producing a class of quasi slaves exercising freedoms that contradicted their servile legal status.141 As the law directed, the act of reducing oneself to a slave was not to be taken lightly—by petitioner, proposed owner, or judge. While the law contained a series of protections for free blacks who might otherwise be coerced or fooled into enslaving themselves, it also incorporated safeguards against those free blacks and proposed masters who might make a mockery of the self-enslavement process and of the institution of slavery itself by fashioning their own arrangements involving nominal or conditional enslavement.142 Whatever the intent of the law, many judges proved perfectly willing to allow free blacks to broker the terms of their own re-enslavement. From county to county, there was great variation in how seriously judges took the letter of the law.

One day after the surrender of Fort Sumter and two days before Virginia would vote to secede from the Union, Jane Payne, Mary Fletcher, and Annah Gleaves Poters filed into the Fauquier County courthouse. As dictated by the legislation passed a month earlier by the state’s General Assembly, each was interrogated by the circuit court judge and commonwealth’s attorney, separately and apart from Ann M. Rector, their proposed mistress. Each of the black women, when asked by the court whether she would be willing to become Rector’s slave unconditionally, unequivocally refused—for that was not the arrangement they had agreed upon. Discovering either that Rector and the three women had colluded to deceive the court, or that Payne, Fletcher, and Poters had simply misconceived their proposed new legal status, the judge promptly dismissed their petition.143 And indeed, it is likely that the three women had chosen to pursue self-enslavement not to become legal slaves, but rather to preserve key elements of their newfound freedom, rooted in relationships with familiar people and in vibrant lives they had forged in Fauquier.

The Fauquier women were not the only Virginians to find a court unsympathetic to their petitions for self-enslavement. Mary Elizabeth Roland of Rockbridge County faced an equally rigorous examination by the circuit court when she

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.