Dr. Laura F. Edwards, associate professor of history at Duke University, spoke to a nearly full house on Monday night.
Edwards lectured in room 30 of ten Hoor Hall about the research she has been doing regarding the unusual legal processes that took place during the early- to mid-19th century. The lecture was the seventh installment of the Summersell lecture series. The lecture was centered around her paper entitled "Was it a crime when John Mann Shot Lydia? Slaves, Law and Justice in the Post-Revolutionary South."
Edwards is also the author of the books "Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction" and "Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era."
Edwards' lecture, which was followed by a brief question and answer session, was centered around the ways in which the actions of slaves who found themselves involved in legal situations affected the legal processes in the southern states. As mentioned in the title of Edwards' paper, the lecture focused mainly on the case of John Mann v. Lydia, which took place in eastern North Carolina in the spring of 1829. The case involved the murder of a young slave woman who was shot in the back by Mann, a white man, for refusing to accept physically dangerous discipline.
Edwards commented on the lack of credibility held in the direct testimonies of slaves in Southern courtrooms during the period and the ways in which their credibility changed once they began to confide in whites willing to testify for them.
"They would say 'that's slave testimony ... you can't believe that,'" Edwards said. "But it's not slave testimony because it comes from a white person who is a property-owning person, and therefore he is relaying truth because he creates truth by simply speaking those words.
"So ironically then, the emphasis on credit and character also allowed slave testimony to enter in through the back door."
Edwards also cited a case involving a slave woman named Sylva who, even though she was eventually murdered by her white overseer, was successful in relaying information about the ways in which she had been mistreated to other whites, who in turn got the overseer convicted.
"Sylva wasn't just dragging around, whining about how she was hurt," Edwards said. "She actually put information out there in strategic, explicit ways to shape the perception of what was going on to place the overseer in a position where he could perhaps be disciplined, and it worked.
"Had Sylva not done this, it would have been like so many other situations in which a slave dies of 'misfortune,' which means that they simply die, but no one is responsible."
Edwards explained that cases like these helped to establish legal opportunities for slaves that would not have been available to them, had no one had the courage to speak up about them.
"The fact that words, regardless of the source, acquired credibility simply because white people spoke them, opened up a whole range of other ways that slaves could have input on legal matters," Edwards said.
Edwards, who has been researching this topic since 1995, is currently performing research on the reconfiguration of domestic relations, patriarchy and the status of white women and enslaved women and men in the early 19th century.
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