The Reconstruction of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and Popular Conceptions of Governance

Abstract

The Reconstruction of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and Popular Conceptions of Governance LAURA F. EDWARDS Introduction In 1870 Maria Mitchell, an AfricanAmerican woman in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, did something that she could not have done when she was enslaved: she “talked for her rights.” Mitchell had a problem with B.D. Armstrong, a white landowner who was likely her employer. According to the testimony in the trial that followed, she expressed her anger in a form common to the nineteenth-century South: a highly stylized, verbal barrage designed to draw attention to the situation and to shame the intended target. Or, as her son put it, “his Mama was talking loud.” Armstrong de­ manded that she stop. Mitchell responded that “she was talking for her rights and would as much as she pleased and as loud as she pleased.” So Armstrong issued a threat: “if she did not hush he would make her hush.” When Mitchell continued to denounce him, he struck her in the face and broke out a piece of her tooth—or so she alleged when she turned her words into action and used her rights to file charges against him.1 I stumbled across Maria Mitchell’s case while I was looking for something else. I flagged it, nonetheless, because I thought it provided a particularly compelling example of something I already knew: how the constitutional changes ofthe Reconstruction era extended rights to African Americans and, as a result, opened up the legal system to them. The Reconstruction Amendments profoundly altered the legal status of Maria Mitchell and other African Americans: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship and provided federal protection of civil rights, which prohibited states from discriminating on the basis of race; and the Fifteenth Amendment pro­ vided federal oversight of voting rights. Mitchell’s words, that “she was talking for her rights and would as much as she pleased and as loud as she pleased,” underscored the RECONSTRUCTION RIGHTS: THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 311 importance of those changes in a way that was hard to miss. That initial interpretation, however, ob­ scured a much more interesting story, one of constitutional change located in places that most ofus would be hard-pressed to find on a map and in the context of legal matters that most ofus would consider unremarkable, not constitutional. The key to this other story lay in the particular legal context that produced cases like the one involving Maria Mitchell. These sources are not the published materials —the statutes, appellate cases, and legal treatises—that most people associate with the law and legal history. These are loose, handwritten documents. Some were produced by clerks in circuit courts, which met on a regular schedule in court towns and which held jury trials. Others were produced by magistrates, many of whom had no legal training and set up court where they were, taking time out of their day to hear complaints, issue warrants, adjudicate minor cases, and send more serious issues up through the system. The people involved in these cases took an active part in this system, collecting evidence, providing information, and observing the proceedings. You actually see that context in the documents. The handwriting is by the officials, pen in hand, struggling to keep up with oral testimony and to capture the words in writing. The names are those of all the people there—the men and women, rich and poor, white and black, free and enslaved, young and old—who were hashing out life’s problems. You can even catch accents in the idiosyncratic spelling— bits of French, perhaps German, some Irish, definitely Scottish, and certainly the Creole cadences that marked the speech of so many people of African descent.2 While Maria Mitchell’s case was adjudi­ cated in the South, the legal framework that shaped her case was not exclusively South­ ern. It characterized the operation of law in local courts throughout the United States, and it was the one with which most Americans had familiarity in the early nineteenth century. This part ofthe legal system, focused at the local level, was charged with main­ taining the public order or, in the terminology...