Black Offenders, Criminal Courts, and Philadelphia Society in the Late Eighteenth-Century

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

To describe fully, accurately, and with suitable sensitivity the in history has been a persistent challenge to historians. Because histori? cally blacks have been uneducated, inarticulate, and denied access to arenas of influence and power in society, meeting the challenge has not been easy. Important advancements in our understanding of history, when they have come, have resulted from the use by historians of imaginative approaches to offer new materials and perspectives.1 For early history at least, legal history has not made contributions commensurate with its potential for clarify ing the relationship (and changes in the relationship) between and white Americans, or for shedding light on social tensions associated with that relation? ship. Treatments of crime and its judicial resolution are particularly well suited to illuminate a society's distribution of power, and changes occurring in its values, assumptions, and priorities over time.2 An examination of crimes attributed to blacks, and their resolution in early Philadelphia, serves as a case in point. Such a study illuminates the nature of personal relations among blacks, and, on different levels of society, between blacks and whites. It also casts light on opportunities or lack of opportunities available to Philadelphia's population. In addition, it demonstrates that theft lay at the heart ofthe eighteenth-century criminal theft born of need rather than calculated revenge against Philadelphia's propertied classes. The dramatic rise in prosecutions against blacks for property offenses in the mid-l?90s, and the concomitant rise in the conviction rate in such prosecu? tions, reflected not so much a growing racism and discrimination against blacks as an increase in thefts, and a more intense concern on the part of authorities with property and its protection. The mounting prosecution level against blacks for theft was paralleled by a similar increase against white thieves. At this point, Philadelphia's black experience began to meld with the broader American preoccupation with safeguarding property and property rights. Such a study also reveals, however, that those who sought to guarantee defendants equality and justice before the law failed. By almost every measure? ment available to students of criminal justice, blacks fared more poorly in Pennsylvania courts than did whites. Even so, reformers in Philadelphia, in conjunction with court personnel, achieved a legal system sensitive to rights, and certainly more fair and just in its practices than society outside the courts.