Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"This book is about how slaves and free people of color used the judicial system in New Orleans to gain, maintain, or surrender their freedom," writes Schafer in her introduction. "It is not a social history of slaves, slaveowners, and free people of color, although the cases reveal much [End Page 312] about all three" (xxii). For nearly a decade and a half, the author combed through New Orleans district court records, as well as every extant issue of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, to discover material about slavery and the law, the quest of blacks for freedom, and how slaves fared when they brought their cases before the city's district courts. The time frame coincides with the creation of five new district courts in the Crescent City in 1846 and the arrival of Union troops in 1862. During that eighteen-year span, the district courts heard numerous cases involving slaves and free blacks.

Whereas older studies of the slavery and the law—including Helen Catterell's classic Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (Washington, D.C., 1927-1937), 5v.—relied on appellate cases, Schafer sorted through thousands of unindexed local records to find the ones dealing with her topic. The results are remarkable, both showing how blacks used the judicial system in Louisiana to obtain their freedom and tracking their success in doing so, at least until the late 1850s when the sectional crisis created a hostile environment.

The author traces the history of the laws concerning manumission, how slaves could legally contract to purchase themselves, how they could obtain their freedom through their owner's last will and testament, and how they struggled to remain free. The final chapters deal with the kidnapping of free people of color, the arrest and incarceration of free blacks entering the state under a law prohibiting their entry, and the voluntary enslavement of a few desperate free blacks on the eve of the Civil War.

Most chapters contain an analytical introduction followed by a number of case summaries illustrating the main topic under discussion. The chapter concerning the lawyer Jean Charles David, who argued a number of cases in behalf of blacks, is singular in the literature. Indeed, our knowledge about the "solicitors" who brought forward cases involving blacks in Louisiana and other states, as well as our knowledge of the judges who heard the cases and issued decrees, is extremely limited.

The book adds a great deal to our understanding of how people of color used the unique judicial system in Louisiana to their advantage, but the author might have more fully explained why such a large portion of the cases involved women. Although she reports that women comprised 66 percent of the slave, and 67 percent of the free black populations in the city, and that females outnumbered males two-to-one in total number of manumissions during the mid-1850s—three-to-one among adults—this important subject probably warrants more attention, even in a strictly judicial context, than given in these pages. In general, however, Becoming Free, Remaining Free succeeds admirably in what it sets out to do and offers a wealth of new information on an important and neglected topic.