Begin the Journey

In the summer of 1991, Loren Schweninger, a professor of history, began traveling the South visiting courthouses and state archives in search of legal petitions related to race and slavery. He expected to find dry facts buried in legal terminology. What he actually found was a wealth of new information about peoples' lives and circumstances between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The petitions portray, in vivid and personal terms, the contrasts, ambivalence, contradictions, ironies, and ambiguities that comprise southern history. He began a project that became a journey. You can follow in his footsteps.

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, tens of thousands of southerners petitioned their legislatures for redress of grievances. They sought to enact laws to create new counties, construct roads, and incorporate schools; they petitioned to eliminate poll taxes, expand suffrage, and protect citizenship rights.

Among their many concerns perhaps none weighed more heavily on their minds than matters involving race and slavery. Only three thousand of these petitions have escaped the ravages of time, but the documents that survive provide a good representation from the Upper and Lower South, eastern and western states, and across the decades from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. They also offer a wealth of material on a variety of topics: slaves who were obedient and faithful to their owners, interracial sex, free people of color, the black family, and attitudes about relations between blacks and whites.

The petitions come mainly from Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas. There are a few from Florida, Alabama, Maryland, and Missouri, and only one each from Georgia and Louisiana. No legislative petitions, it appears, have survived from Kentucky or Arkansas.

Legislative petitions offer immediate testimony on a broad range of subjects by a variety of southerners - black and white, slave and free, slave owner and non-slave owner, women and men - over nearly a century of time. Moreover, responding to a specific event, situation, or danger, petitioners realized that it behooved them to be as forthright and candid as possible. In most cases they knew that they would gain little by pretense or deception, since most people in their communities knew their situations. Consequently, they discussed their circumstances with remarkable candor and accuracy. There is a bias reflected in all testimony, but when it was in the interest of individuals or groups to state their case as clearly and truthfully as possible, and to secure corroborating testimony, the evidence achieves a high degree of credibility.

In some areas, legislative petitions flesh out, enrich, and supplement material that is available from other sources. But in other areas they point to new interpretations. This is particularly true with regard to manumission: how and when blacks achieved their freedom, and how many, who were required by law to leave a state, actually did so. Simultaneously, the petitions provide a clear picture of the pressures--legal, economic, and political - pushing manumitted slaves back into slavery. Heirs of slave owners were often reluctant to give up large numbers of manumitted slaves and struggled to maintain ownership following the death of an owner. The tenuous nature of freedom in a hostile environment and the precarious balance tipping back into slavery are illustrated in these records.

The documents illuminate the challenges faced by free women of color. Manumitted in larger numbers than their male counterparts, comprising a larger portion of the free black population, free black women struggled to protect themselves and their families. "Tis with anxious and trembling forebodings then that your Petitioner presents herself before the Legislature to supplicate of their liberality and clemency," Elvira Jones, a former slave, wrote the Virginia General Assembly, in 1823; she asked for permission for "herself and children to live and die in the Land of their nativity." Jones' dilemma was shared by other women who confronted increasingly restrictive laws, faced wrenching decisions about their families, and struggled against economic, political, and legal barriers. How they responded, and how, in the end, many of them failed, is captured in legislative petitions perhaps better than in any other primary source.

Other petitions deal with the efforts of slave owners to control rebellious slaves. The response of whites to the defiance of runaway Sambo in Goochland County, Virginia, in 1778, was repeated in other states during subsequent decades. Arrested and jailed for preparing "poisonous medicens," Sambo escaped with a fellow slave, assembled "in Rebellion" deep in the woods, and committed "many Hostilitys, Break.g open Houses, kill.g Hoggs &c, Whereupon diffr sirches was made after them the sd. Slaves, who was at Length routed at or near their cave in the Ground wch. they the sd. Slaves to all appearance had us'd for their place of residence & safty for some time." Despite repeated entreaties to surrender, Sambo refused, and was shot "dead on the spott."

In these and a number of other areas, legislative petitions show the complex and ambiguous nature of race and slavery in the South. They demonstrate how some blacks remained loyal to the South, even to the institution of slavery, while some whites criticized the South's treatment of slaves and stood against the "peculiar institution." There are petitions from free persons of color who owned slaves, controlled large tracts of land, and attempted to conceal their African heritage; there are petitions from slaves who, in economic terms, were better off than their white neighbors; there are even petitions from free blacks who wished to return to slavery. In short, these documents portray, in vivid and personal terms, the contrasts, ambivalences, contradictions, ironies, and ambiguities that comprise southern history.