Substituting Law for the Lash: Emancipation and Legal Formalism in a Mississippi County Court

Abstract

After emancipation white southerners tried to use law to do what they had before done extralegally: discipline Black labor. That they did this through a system of laws that northerners called Black Codes is well known. In Mississippi and in many other southern states, they also created a system of inferior courts to control Blacks. But whites found legal culture an unwieldy tool. At the trial level of jurisprudence, formal procedures and customs allowed Black defendants and victims opportunities they had never had under the slavery regime. Legal formalism provided Blacks new access to the criminal justice system and, at the same time, undermined whites' immature confidence in law as an instrument of their domination over Blacks. The role of inferior courts in Presidential Reconstruction has been obscure.' But contemporaries interpreted the new inferior courts as central to southern whites' efforts to use law to control Black behavior. The records of these inferior courts, little studied by Reconstruction scholars, offer a glimpse of the workings of an important if overlooked provision of the Black Codes. More generally, they throw open a window on efforts by an elite class to mobilize law to its own ends.