‘Appropriated to her own use and benefit’: women, larceny, and race in post-Civil War South Carolina

ABSTRACT

This article examines Black and White women’s trials for larceny in South Carolina between 1865 and 1900. County-level court records demonstrate that most women defendants stood accused of appropriating food, clothing, or household items from their workplaces. Larceny cases provide important insights into poor and working-class women’s lives, survival strategies, and desires, revealing commonalities across the colour line of the postbellum U.S. South. However, White southerners racialised larceny in ways which meant African American women were more likely to be accused and convicted of theft. The essay also explores the myriad ways in which women strategically fought for acquittal.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime
• theft
• U.S. South
• race
• women and law
• courts

Introduction

On a summer evening in 1878, Hannah Langston, a young African American woman employed as a live-in domestic worker in rural Laurens County, South Carolina, received a visit from her mother, Louisa Pitts. Whatever the two women talked about made Louisa Pitts decide her daughter ought to leave her job and that she should ‘carry her home with her’. Pitts told her daughter to ‘get her things’ from her room. The two women left the home of the Duncans, the White family for whom Hannah Langston worked, with Langston toting a ‘small bundle’ and Louisa Pitts carrying a parcel of things ‘tied up in a sheet or tablecloth on her head’. But before they had walked more than a mile, John Duncan rode up behind the women on his horse, ‘cutting through the fields’. In his words, he ‘drove them back before him to his house’. Inside the house, John Duncan’s wife ‘opened the bundles and took out the articles’ that Langston and Pitts had carried. Inside the bundles Mrs. Duncan found ‘three white underskirts, five white aprons, three handkerchiefs, one ladies’ silk dress, a silk scarf, and four towels’. The Duncans promptly charged Langston and Pitts with larceny before a local justice of the peace (JP). At the preliminary hearing, Pitts testified that she had accidentally ‘got more than belonged to her [daughter]’ when she went to help Langston gather her things from the Duncans’ house. Hannah Langston, however, admitted that ‘her mother told her to take [the things]’. As the clerk paraphrasing her words recorded, ‘[Her mother] told her to get her some underskirts and some towels. [She] said she did not have much and she needed these things’. As for the silk dress, by far the most expensive item the women had taken, Langston testified that her employer Mrs. Duncan ‘had told her she would fix the silk dress for her to wear, [but] she had never worn it, nor had it been fixed’. A grand jury decided to bring charges against Louisa Pitts alone. In February 1879, a trial jury convicted Pitts of larceny and the judge sentenced her to a year in the South Carolina Penitentiary.¹

As historians of female criminality have observed, women like Louisa Pitts and Hannah Langston represented the minority in nineteenth-century courts, where men, as now, predominated as defendants.² Certainly this was true of post-Civil War South Carolina. In Charleston and Richland counties, the largest and most urban regions among the six counties surveyed for this article, women accounted for approximately 15% of defendants between 1865 and 1900. In rural areas like Laurens County, where Pitts and Langston lived, women appeared in court still less frequently, although their numbers fluctuated considerably between court terms, with sometimes several women standing trial during one court term and none the next.

However, among women accused of larceny, Hannah Langston and Louisa Pitts were much more representative. First, the mother and daughter were African American, like about 90% of the women indicted for larceny in South Carolina during this period. Second, the theft emerged from Hannah Langston’s labour, here her labour as a domestic worker. By virtue of working in private households, domestic workers had opportunities to take items and also faced employers’ suspicions whenever anything went missing from their homes. Domestics were underpaid and, as suggested by Hannah Langston’s testimony about the silk dress that Mrs. Duncan had allegedly promised to give her as payment, some employers failed to consistently compensate workers. Moreover, Hannah Langston’s confession reveals another important aspect of women’s theft: most women stood accused of taking household objects, food, and clothing that they intended to incorporate into their own homes, cupboards, and wardrobes. ‘She said she did not have much and she needed these things’, Langston testified about her mother, who had told her to gather extra underskirts and towels from her employer’s household.

This article draws on more than 400 local court records from six geographically and demographically diverse South Carolina counties to examine the experiences of Black and White women who were accused of larceny in the post-Civil War South.³ As in English common law, South Carolina statutes defined larceny as the theft of another person’s personal property without the use of force.⁴ While historians of Western Europe and North America have linked nineteenth-century women’s theft with changing patterns in consumerism and the rise of department stores, the experiences of women in mid-to-late-nineteenth-century South Carolina do not neatly fit into the existing historiography.⁵ Black and White women in this predominately rural southern state were far more likely to take items from their workplaces than from stores. More recently, historians have written about professional female thieves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who made or supplemented their incomes through the theft and sale of stolen items.⁶ Yet rates of recidivism for larceny in postbellum South Carolina were extremely low, and courts tried only a few women for pickpocketing, shoplifting, or working as professional ‘fences’ who sold stolen goods. While most alleged thefts did occur in the context of women’s paid labour as domestic workers, laundresses, and agricultural labourers and their unpaid labour as mothers, wives, and housekeepers, the great majority of women arrested for theft in post-Civil War South Carolina were one-time offenders rather than professionals. Moreover, they were overwhelmingly poor or working-class women whose actions and courtroom testimonies in defence of their actions tell us much about their everyday lives.

This essay argues that most Black and White women accused of larceny in post-Civil War South Carolina ‘appropriated’ objects, primarily clothing and textiles, household items, and food ‘to their own benefit’ or ‘to their own use’, as legal affidavits sometimes phrased it. Like Louisa Pitts, who sought to appropriate the textiles from her daughter’s employer’s house because ‘she did not have much’, most women took food to sustain themselves and their families and clothing and household objects to incorporate into their households. While a few career female burglars operated in the cities of Columbia and Charleston, this article focuses on more representative thefts. Examining ordinary larceny cases enriches our understanding of poor women’s paid and unpaid labour, their social relationships, their strategies to survive poverty, and their efforts to enjoy their lives.

As historians of the U.S. South have demonstrated, White political leaders in the late nineteenth century used criminal law and state carceral systems to bolster White supremacy and to politically and economically disenfranchise African Americans who had made many gains during Reconstruction (1865–1877). By the 1880s, African American men convicted of even petty theft faced legal disenfranchisement in South Carolina and other southern states.⁷ Southern criminal courts sentenced thousands of Black men to labour for private or state profit in brutal conditions on chain gangs, in penitentiaries, on prison farms, and in convict labour camps.⁸ Recent scholarship by Talitha LeFlouria and Sarah Haley emphasises that Black women also faced high conviction rates, incarceration, and suffering in convict labour regimes.⁹ Black women as well as men most often found themselves tried and convicted of theft, which was highly racialised in the postbellum South. Since the colonial period, southern Whites had asserted that enslaved African Americans—whose own labour and bodies were of course stolen by slaveholders—had a particular ‘disposition’ to theft, especially theft of livestock and crops.¹⁰

After the Civil War, too, approximately 90% of female defendants in South Carolina larceny trials between 1865 and 1900 were Black women.¹¹ The racialisation of property crime and African Americans’ generally greater material deprivations were such that larceny prosecutions against Black men and women greatly outnumbered those against White people. In 1882, for example, the city of Charleston reported that 18 White men and 3 White women had been convicted of larceny the previous year, compared to 305 Black men and 51 Black women. This means about seventeen times as many Black men as White men and seventeen times as many Black women as White women were convicted of larceny. However, Charleston police arrested 399 Black women and 99 White women in 1881. Some White women were arrested, but for crimes other than theft—usually assault or disorderly conduct charges that were often dropped.¹²

This article explores the social context of women’s larceny by exploring the ways in which theft emerged from the context of their paid and unpaid labours. Examining how and why women often stood accused of stealing clothing and textiles, it also builds on the recent scholarship of Laura Edwards to show how textiles continued to have material and symbolic importance for poor and marginalised women in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹³ The essay addresses the racialisation of women’s property crime by comparing the experiences and judicial treatment of Black women with the White women who represented about 10% of women charged with theft despite constituting about 40% of the state’s female population during the four decades after the Civil War.¹⁴ Poor White and Black women’s ‘appropriation’ of food, clothing, and household items shared highly similar logic across the colour line, but White women experienced much lower arrest and conviction rates. This disparity is reflected in arrest statistics and in other sources that reveal how White southerners usually chose to frame White women’s thefts as actions born from dire need rather than criminality. Judges’ and juries’ legal chivalry towards White women, while certainly present, ultimately played less of a role in the racial disparities in women’s arrests and convictions for larceny than did ordinary people’s reluctance to frame ‘respectable’ White women’s theft as criminal in the first place.

Importantly, Black and White women arrested for larceny continued to act for ‘their own benefit’. Close analysis of local court records confirms that women were not passive subjects of the criminal justice system, but rather defendants in the true sense of the word. The sheer variety of tactics and narratives that Black and White women deployed in criminal cases in the postbellum South is impressive and deserves greater attention. While strategic, women’s testimonies before justices and juries also represent rare firsthand accounts from poor and often illiterate women in the nineteenth-century South. Their words, like their thefts, reveal otherwise hidden aspects of their everyday lives, labours, struggles, and desires.

Women’s labours and women’s larceny

A striking majority of Black and White women accused of larceny worked for wages, primarily as domestics. After the Civil War, domestic work in White homes constituted some of the only readily available employment for African American women in particular. Even in the late nineteenth century, when White women began working in South Carolina’s newly-opened textile mills and factories, the racial prejudices of mill owners and White workers alike excluded Black women from these industries.¹⁵ Therefore many married and unmarried Black women, along with some poor White women, who by contrast were generally single women, had few options besides seeking employment as domestics in White households.¹⁶ In rural Oconee County, South Carolina’s westernmost county, for example, 35%–38% of African Americans and almost all employed African American women in the towns of Center, Walhalla, and Westminster worked in domestic service in 1880. They laboured as house cleaners, cooks, nurses for young children, or a combination of all three roles.¹⁷

In the years immediately after Emancipation, freedwomen who worked as domestics frequently lived in their White employers’ households, a situation women disliked because it resembled slavery and limited their time with family. Mere months after the Civil War, state legislators, many of them erstwhile Confederates, even tried to codify the around-the-clock presence of Black domestics into law. One of South Carolina’s notorious 1865 Black Codes declared that

servants … in all the domestic duties of the family shall at all hours of the day and night and on all days of the week promptly answer all calls, and obey and execute all lawful orders and commands of the family in whose service they are employed.¹⁸

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1866 outlawed the Black Codes, some White employers still sought to maintain labour practices reminiscent of slavery.¹⁹

By contrast, freedwomen sought to give greater meaning to Black freedom as a whole and in their own lives. After Emancipation, some freedwomen partially or completely withdrew from wage labour under the supervision of White employers or landlords. They often preferred to work autonomously in their own homes caring for their families and tending to their household economies by working in their gardens, tending poultry and livestock, and sometimes selling extra eggs, butter, vegetables, and other products.²⁰ As for freedwomen who worked as domestics in White homes, they resisted employers’ attempts to circumscribe their freedom. They insisted on better wages, refused to perform extra tasks without pay, and asserted their new status as freedwomen through their words and actions.²¹

As Thavolia Glymph and Tera Hunter demonstrate, the post-Emancipation White southern household, like the plantation household that preceded it, was the site of power struggles and even violence between White female employers and Black female employees.²² The court dockets of Reconstruction-era South Carolina include cases where Black domestics accused White employers of sometimes repeated and casual violence. In 1869, for example, a Charleston freedwoman named Anne Brown testified that her White employer, Margaret McEvoy, ‘with whom she had been staying as a servant’, ‘did strike her with her hands’, threw ‘a basin of water upon her’, and ‘struck her with a glass lamp’, all within the space of two days. Seeking justice and restitution for her mistreatment, Anne Brown pressed assault charges against McEvoy. She named a witness to the violence, but the JP involved dropped her case ‘for lack of evidence’.²³ Indeed, many officials dismissed or trivialised freedpeople’s complaints about violence if the perpetrators were White.²⁴

In addition to the possibility of mistreatment by employers, domestics also received poor compensation for their labour and, in many cases, faced difficulties in obtaining the payment they were owed. After the Civil War, cash-strapped employers, some of whom had once enslaved their employees, often tried to pay them ‘in kind’ with food or gifts in lieu of wages.²⁵ Such ‘in kind’ payments irritated women, in part because some employers repeatedly failed to compensate them. Recall Hannah Langston’s appropriation of the silk dress that her employer had allegedly promised but never given her as payment.

Although Hannah Langston apparently lived in her employers’ house as late as 1878, freedwomen employed as domestics generally preferred to ‘live out’ in their own homes with their families. By the 1870s, most Black domestic workers did so, leveraging their new mobility as freedwomen, including the ability to quit and find new positions, to set the terms of their employment.²⁶ Even with these positive changes, domestics continued to work long hours for low wages. Cooks received slightly better wages than other domestics, but generally had to arrive at work early in the morning to start breakfast and then remain until after dinner. Historian Rebecca Sharpless finds that cooks commonly worked twelve to thirteen hours a day, even missing meals with their families to prepare employers’ food.²⁷ Many cooks engaged in ‘pan-toting’, taking home leftover food they had cooked. Rather than a breach of the rules of employment, pan-toting was customary, and cooks and employers alike often considered it part of cooks’ remuneration for their work.²⁸

Yet pan-toting also made cooks vulnerable to accusations of theft. In 1898, a jury in Columbia convicted Ida Byas, an African American cook, of burglary. She had transferred flour, bacon, and syrup from her employer’s pantry to her own cupboard. In her later pardon petition to the governor, Byas and her attorney explained that Byas’ husband had deserted her, leaving her alone to care for her ‘only child’, a four-year-old boy who was now left ‘without means of support, without parental care and protection’. Ida Byas’ crime had been to take five dollars’ worth of food to her cupboard to feed her child. Her sentence—five years in the penitentiary—left that child alone. Byas was determined to return to him. She enlisted her pastor and dozens of White and Black citizens to sign her petition and the governor commuted Byas’ sentence to one year.²⁹ In appropriating extra food from their workplace, women sought to feed themselves and their families and, in some cases, to take the wages they felt they were owed. This logic surely resonated strongly for Black women like Byas, freedwomen whose labour and bodily autonomy had been stolen from them for decades before Emancipation.

At other times, employers accused domestic workers of taking items that employers had lost or blamed them for thefts committed by others. As Kali Gross notes, Black women domestics found themselves ‘profoundly susceptible to white employers’ accusations of theft—whether real or imagined’.³⁰ Some employers showed a tendency to wildly accuse domestics. The wealthy Tupper family of Charleston accused an African American nurse of attempting to poison their baby and, within a year, charged another Black domestic worker with taking a pair of expensive diamond earrings. ‘There is no direct proof of the defendant’s having committed larceny’, the JP in the latter case wrote sceptically, ‘but … Mr. Tupper having gone to every method to try and find them still entertains the suspicion that she is guilty’. Despite the lack of evidence, a jury convicted the woman of larceny, and she spent two years in the penitentiary.³¹

The Tupper family’s suspicions serve as a reminder that while some domestic workers did appropriate things from employers’ households, misplaced objects always meant trouble for the woman who cooked and cleaned in the house for wages. Indeed, employers might maliciously accuse domestics of theft. In her 1968 memoir, civil rights activist Anne Moody recounted how when she was a teenager working as a domestic in Jim Crow Mississippi, her White employer accused Moody and her brother of stealing from her house. Moody believed her employer did this because she resented Moody’s friendship with her son.³²

Laundresses who took in clothing to wash also found themselves vulnerable to accusations of theft. Some laundresses borrowed clothing to wear to special occasions, risking discovery.³³ Other laundresses withheld customers’ clothing as a strategy to obtain fair compensation for their labour. In 1899, Patience Jamison, a young Black woman, pleaded guilty to a larceny charge but subsequently appealed her conviction. In her appeal, Jamison told how she had been employed by the owner of a prominent Columbia hotel to wash linens. ‘Upon taking the last work to the hotel’, she was not paid and so ‘she told the proprietor that she would not bring the wash she then had took until she was paid’. The hotel’s owner swore out an arrest warrant against her. Jamison said the constables who searched her house not only confiscated the hotels’ linens, but also ‘a lot of other things which belonged to her’. Her strategy of withholding the hotel’s linens until she was compensated had backfired. To make matters worse, Jamison explained in her appeal, the attorney that her mother hired to represent her had encouraged Jamison to plead guilty. Jamison did so, she said, ‘when in fact she was and is innocent of the charges against her and made this plea of guilty in ignorance of its effects’. She described herself as ‘a young woman reared in [Richland] County near Gadsden’ who had only arrived in the city of Columbia a few years ago, had begun working as a laundress only after her husband abandoned her, and had ‘never [been] in a court before in all her life’. Upon Jamison’s appeal, the judge granted her a new trial, whose outcome is unclear from the surviving records.³⁴ Patience Jamison’s case is intriguing in part because she implied that a young woman ‘reared in’ the country might have less legal knowledge and be less likely to frequent the courthouse.

Yet while Black and White women in rural counties were indicted for larceny at lower rates than women in Charleston and Columbia, the accusations against them shared a similar logic: rural women’s larceny also stemmed from their paid and unpaid labours. Whether they worked as farm labourers, as domestics, or ‘kept house’ for their families, poor Black and White women struggled to make ends meet and to feed their families. Court records vividly depict how women living in rural areas sometimes appropriated neighbours’ livestock. They typically slaughtered and cooked the animals as quickly as possible, both to fill their bellies and to rid themselves of the evidence. In an 1885 case of livestock theft, Elizabeth Whiteman, a White woman living in rural Oconee County, pleaded guilty to appropriating a hog that ‘had gotten loose’. By the time the pig’s owner ‘tracked the hog to the neighborhood where the defendants live’, Elizabeth Whiteman had cooked the pig into ‘hams’ for her family to eat. The furious pig owner testified to a JP that he somehow recognised these freshly-cooked hams as ‘the meat of my hog’. Whiteman and two of her adult brothers spent a month in the county jail.³⁵ In 1871, Mary Fricks, a poor rural White woman who frequently had run-ins with the law, was also convicted of the theft of a hog. A witness testified about the discovery of ‘a fresh hog head about cooked’ in Fricks’ house. She had been preparing it as a meal for her two daughters.³⁶ Such larceny cases also involved battles over customary rights, here the right to let a pig wander to feed versus the right to appropriate a loose animal for oneself. Usually, juries sided with the property owner.

A number of landlords also accused women who worked as farm labourers of stealing crops. In a rural area of Richland County, Hester Alexander, a young Black woman, was accused in 1881 of having ‘appropriated to her own’ a few potatoes from her landlord’s patch.³⁷ It is easy to imagine hungry women picking a handful (or an armful) of crops when they believed no one was watching. Likewise, some women appropriated tempting garments from clothes lines and indeed, alongside food, Black and White women most frequently stood trial for stealing clothing.³⁸

The theft of clothing

Marginalised women in the nineteenth-century South highly valued clothing as a medium of credit, currency, and capital in a legal system where women enjoyed few property rights. As Laura Edwards demonstrates, even enslaved people who were legally held as property could stake claims to the ‘clothes on their back’ as a special category of personal property in the decades after the American Revolution.³⁹ Indeed, the centrality of textiles to African Americans’ search for more expansive meanings of freedom continued after the Civil War. White southerners’ Emancipation-era diaries describe freedwomen in public spaces with parasols and fine clothing.⁴⁰ Some of these accounts stem from White southerners’ horror at the idea of freedwomen going about their business dressed as ‘ladies’, a sight they took as a violation of racial etiquette and a sign of an antebellum world turned upside down.

Yet court records from Reconstruction South Carolina confirm that freedwomen as well as poor White women highly valued clothing as both a necessity and as visible markers of their personhood and femininity. Moreover, women sometimes appropriated others’ clothing for themselves. In an 1867 case that a grand jury ultimately did not pursue, a White woman accused two young freedwomen of larceny. The complainant said the women had stolen fifty dollars’ worth of cotton shirts and dresses. A constable found them living in an ‘abandoned smokehouse’. As was often the case for freedwomen who had recently left the sites of their former enslavement, their clothing constituted their only possessions.⁴¹

While numerous freedwomen stood trial for stealing clothing after the Civil War, poor White women appeared as defendants in similar cases that also reflected their material deprivations. Nancy Redman of Oconee County, a poor, elderly White woman, spent three months in jail in 1870 after a White man accused her of taking ‘two cotton dresses belonging to [his] wife’ from his ‘trash place’. Although his wife had discarded the dresses, the sight of Nancy Redman wearing them evidently angered the complainant.⁴²

For nineteenth-century Americans, clothing was a clear, visual indication of status and social position that ideally reflected a person’s class, race, and respectability. Troublingly, however, people could change their attire, thus asserting a different status or identity.⁴³ The class and racial anxieties bound up in clothing help explain why complainants sometimes retaliated against women who appropriated garments and other items associated with personal status even when owners had abandoned the objects.

For example, the larceny cases that crowded Charleston’s early Reconstruction-era dockets reflect how needy women appropriated clothing and linens from homes abandoned by Confederates who had fled the Union Army’s approach in early 1865 and how returning homeowners later sought to punish these women for even minor thefts.⁴⁴ Some women slipped into quiet houses to take furniture, food, and clothing that planter families had left behind. Food shortages in the South during and in the aftermath of the Civil War were so severe that poor White women in some Confederate cities had initiated bread riots and demanded relief.⁴⁵ Yet impoverished and starving women who removed much-needed items from empty homes faced the threat of arrest or even more dire consequences. Leslie Schwalm recounts the anger of lowcountry South Carolina planter Charles Manigault when he returned to the rice plantation that he had abandoned during the war to discover that Peggy, a woman he had enslaved, had transferred his wife’s mahogany bed and mattress to her own small house. A vengeful Manigault evicted Peggy and her children, which left them exposed to the elements. Peggy died soon afterwards. In his journal, Manigault noted with disdain that Peggy had also appropriated pink ribbons from his mansion for her daughter to wear in her hair.⁴⁶

Although some women chose to take clothing and linens because they were easy to transport, conceal, and trade, as Laura Edwards persuasively argues, the story of Peggy as well as numerous court records demonstrate that many women also incorporated appropriated items into their own households to sustain their families and gave appropriated clothing to family and friends or wore it themselves.⁴⁷ Notably, some women were arrested while wearing stolen clothing. A White family in rural Clarendon County charged two Black women, a mother and daughter, with stealing ‘a blanket, tablecloth, coats, towels, undershirts, shirts, a bedspread, a flannel coat, and pants’—a literal laundry list—after witnesses observed the women wearing the shirts and coats outdoors. The need to keep warm surely motivated the theft of textiles as well.⁴⁸

Other women created new outfits from appropriated textiles, embracing the creativity of altering clothing to suit their style and, in the context of theft, to disguise the fabrics. In 1896, a jury convicted Francina James, a Black woman, of breaking into a store in Columbia and taking several expensive lengths of silk and India linen. The storeowner said he saw James ‘in a dress made out of the silk’. Moreover, a Black woman testified that James had given a friend ‘some silk to make a girl’s dress’ for her child and another friend was seen wearing ‘a shirtwaist which she said Francina James had given to her’. Francina James had made inventive use of the fabrics, sewing garments and sharing the fine silk and linen with her friends.⁴⁹ Similarly, Elizabeth Hyde Botume, a White northern woman who taught school in the South Carolina Sea Islands during Reconstruction, wrote that ‘it was a very common thing’ for freedwomen who had spent the day picking cotton to leave the fields with ‘a few handfuls of cotton’. They then used the extra material to make ‘shapely gloves and stout stockings’ which they wore or sent to family members.⁵⁰

For poor women, clothing represented not only a necessity, but also a means of expression and a marker of identity and womanhood in a society whose elites often sought to denigrate their womanhood. As Tiya Miles writes, material objects can be part of marginalised people’s struggle for dignity and liberty.⁵¹ Poor Black and White women who owned very little sometimes appropriated clothes to express their femininity, their sense of style, and the status to which they aspired. In a different type of criminal case, assault prosecutions, women complainants frequently testified that their assailants had ‘torn their clothes’. This was a significant loss for women who highly valued the few clothes they owned. Documents that recorded a person’s admittance to the South Carolina Penitentiary noted what property they owned so it could be levied to pay court costs. Tellingly, most clerks simply wrote ‘dressing apparel’. For many poor and working-class women, their clothing was all they possessed.

Defendants’ strategies

Most female criminal defendants in post-Civil War South Carolina were poor, disadvantaged in the courtroom due to their material deprivations and, in the case of Black women, systemic racism, but they were not passive or silent subjects of the criminal justice system. Women defendants in larceny trials employed a variety of legal strategies, courtroom narratives, and extralegal negotiations to escape conviction. Some women avoided trial altogether by convincing the complainant to discontinue the case, while others prepared their defence, consulted with their attorney, and sought favourable witnesses. Indeed, in the legal culture of nineteenth-century South Carolina, officials expected defendants to take responsibility for their own defence, even though they had a right to legal counsel. One judge admonished a White woman for not having ‘properly managed her own case’.⁵² While a few other women testified that they had little legal knowledge or experience with courts (such as Patience Jamison, who had ‘never [been] in a court before in all her life’), most defendants did not need encouragement to plan their rebuttals to the charges against them. Moreover, they frequently managed their cases while imprisoned in county jails, as many women accused of larceny could not make bail. Incarcerated defendants deputised attorneys or friends to gather witnesses and wrote or dictated letters to negotiate with complainants.

In a legal culture where complainants initiated most criminal prosecutions before a justice of the peace and subsequently exercised considerable control over how far the case would proceed, defendants often sought to convince complainants to drop the case. Defendants in jail awaiting trial sent relatives to bargain with complainants. In 1885, Patrick Connor, a White man, charged Caroline Robinson, a Black domestic worker, with larceny. A constable arrested Robinson and she could not make bail. Two days later, however, Connor wrote a letter to the county solicitor (a position similar to a district attorney) requesting to drop the case. Connor explained, ‘the husband of the woman has been to see me. The woman has been lately confined, and from all I would rather not proceed in the matter’. Robinson’s husband succeeded in convincing Connor to discontinue the case, in part by emphasising his wife’s fragile health due to her pregnancy.⁵³

Other Black women’s relatives also sought to appeal to complainants’ familiarity with gendered narratives that somewhat bridged race. In one case from Charleston, Archibald Miller, a Black man who worked as a day labourer, successfully intervened with a complainant, a White man who had accused Miller’s teenage daughter Florence of larceny. Archibald Miller apologised on Florence’s behalf and proposed ‘to send his daughter out of the city to get her out of the influences by which she was surrounded’. Miller promised to send Florence to ‘her Uncle Fulmore in Sumter County’, and the complainant agreed to discontinue the case. By describing his daughter as a good girl surrounded by bad influences in the big city who could be reformed if she spent time with extended family in the more wholesome countryside, Miller drew on a gendered narrative that transcended race. Relatives’ interventions often worked, perhaps because they helped complainants see defendants as people embedded in family relationships.⁵⁴

Other women intervened with complainants themselves, sometimes not by negotiating with them, but by initiating a counter-prosecution. In 1867, George Webster, a White farmer in rural Marlboro County, accused Frances McAlister, a freedwoman, of having ‘carried away a quilt and homespun dress’ from his residence. Frances McAlister’s response, however, reminded him that because Black southerners had won the right to testify in court against White people under the Civil Rights Act of 1866, she, too, could go to a JP and report a crime. McAlister charged Webster with having assaulted her ‘by whipping her with a plow line’. Another freedwoman testified at the preliminary hearing that she had witnessed Webster’s assault on McAlister. Webster hastily wrote to the county solicitor saying he had ‘satisfied’ himself with McAlister and they each dropped the charges.⁵⁵ In initiating a counter criminal case, McAlister defended herself by threatening to hold Webster legally accountable for his assault and ultimately brought him to bargain with her outside of court. Although Frances McAlister had spent most of her life enslaved, she was conversant in local legal culture.⁵⁶ Moreover, the ‘X’ that McAlister wrote above her name on the affidavit did not prevent her from defending herself.

Literacy was nevertheless a useful tool for defendants, enabling them to send correspondence even from jail. Doubtless recipients or clerks discarded most such letters, but some remain enclosed in county court records. In 1890, the McGees, a White couple in Oconee County, accused White domestic worker Sallie Chastain of stealing a watch. Chastain could not pay her bail, but she penned a polite but urgent letter to the McGees from jail.

I take the pleasure to rite you a few lines to let you no that I would be glad to see you all and talk with you a little while but it is not possible for me to see you soon,

Chastain wrote, referring to her imprisonment.

Mr. and Mrs. McGee I want to no whether you ever mist anything from your house or not. And Mrs., I want you to rite me all about it, whether I was an honest girl about your house. Rite to me as soon as you get this,

she concluded. Chastain apparently aimed to express her ignorance of any theft and to remind the McGees that she had been ‘an honest girl’ in their employment. Although the McGees did not drop the case, a jury acquitted Sallie Chastain.⁵⁷

A more effective appeal was the letter Ella Williams, a Black domestic worker whose White employers had accused her of theft, wrote to them from the Columbia jail in 1900:

Dear Mrs. Whaley, I write to ask the murcy of you and Doctor. While I [k]now that I have treated you all wrong and had me in here for so doing if I could of placed the things back like they was when I find them ten minutes after I had did it I would of did so but could not. While we all doe things that are not write some time but if I can only get out of this I really will do nothing that is not write any more so Mrs. Whaley I write to ask if you and doctor will go my bond to get me out of gail till court. I never will forget you if you will doe that for me. I am in pain from my knees to my shoulders from sleeping on the floor and it is so coal in here. Please mam do all you can for me.

Ella Williams’ penitent tone, her evocation of the severe jailhouse environment and its painful effect on her, and her appeals to the Whaleys achieved their desired effect. ‘For more than two years she has been my cook and house servant’, Whaley told the county solicitor in a letter requesting him to drop the case. ‘Her extreme penitence, confession, and return of what she has taken from me satisfies me … that the severe lesson she has received will arrest her career’. Whaley added that Williams’ crime ‘was due to her weakness and ignorance rather than to any innate depravity’, which points to the gendered racism that shaped his interpretation of her theft. However, Williams herself noted in her letter that ‘we all doe things that are not write some time’, universalising her moral struggle. Williams also strategically used her personal knowledge of the complainants. In addressing her letter to ‘Mrs. Whaley’ and writing ‘please mam do all you can for me’, she correctly judged that Mrs. Whaley would be more sympathetic than her husband—‘my wife is getting herself sick about this girl’, Whaley wrote.⁵⁸

Defendants who could not convince complainants to drop their case nevertheless drew on a variety of legal strategies in the courtroom. Some women sought to place blame for the theft elsewhere. In 1870, Roxanna Simon, a young freedwoman, charged her neighbour Fanny Washington, also a freedwoman, with stealing money from her trunk. Specifically, Simon said Washington had ‘appropriated’ twenty-two dollars ‘to her own use’ and used the money to buy ‘dresses and other wearing apparel’ for her wedding. Fanny Washington, however, pointed out that Simon regularly held ‘religious meetings’ which made their boardinghouse rooms ‘public to everybody’; she herself had recently missed ‘some small articles’ from her room. Furthermore, her boyfriend had given her the money for her wedding clothes. In of themselves, the two young freedwomen’s testimonies offer intriguing glimpses of how they were embracing freedom in different ways—living independently in boardinghouse rooms, hosting religious gatherings for friends, saving up hard-earned money for the future, and, indeed, occasionally clashing with one another. Black women not infrequently accused other Black women of theft, especially women with whom they lived or worked in close quarters. In this case, Fanny Washington’s testimony in her own defence also provided a convincing counternarrative that explained the disappearance of Roxanna Simon’s money. The grand jury chose not to proceed with the case against Washington, suggesting they found her explanation persuasive.⁵⁹

As Natalie Zemon Davis writes in her 1987 book Fiction in their Archives, talking about a crime, whether in a courtroom or in the early modern pardon petitions that her book examines, requires the teller to ‘shape’ a real event into a story, a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Storytellers draw on literary or oral traditions, cultural tropes, and stock figures in ordering their narratives and making them resonate with their audience. Often, the story that the jury accepts is the one they find to be most coherent, believable, and culturally resonant rather than simply the one that is true.⁶⁰

Women defendants’ testimonies demonstrate that they shrewdly understood the art and value of crafting a logical narrative that would resonate with White male judges and White-majority juries. Katy Alford, a middle-aged Black woman who stood trial for burglary in 1883, strategically drew on gendered and racial tropes in her testimony. Morris Covington, a White man who employed Alford as a farm labourer, accused her of having stolen a substantial 120 pounds of bacon from his barn.⁶¹ Covington testified that he had seen ‘Katy go in and out of the house twice the night the barn was broken open, once with a light’. In her testimony, Alford agreed she had done so, but told a different story about what had happened by the barn. She said she had encountered ‘a black man by the crib door’ who told her ‘that he was going to get some meat and would pay her five dollars if she would say nothing about [it]’. When Alford protested, she claimed the man threatened her that ‘if she told he would kill her’. Alford then had no choice but to let him ‘get the meat out of the barn’. The grand jury chose not to pursue the case, suggesting Alford’s narrative convinced them of the guilt of the mysterious ‘black man by the crib door’. Whether her story was true or not, Katy Alford clearly drew upon rural Whites’ fears about Black men roaming the countryside and breaking into barns. She also succeeded in presenting herself as a loyal employee who had to be threatened to keep silent.⁶² Indeed, several Black women on trial probably strategically displaced blame onto shadowy, unknown Black men.⁶³

Women also translated their understanding of ideologies about race and gender into strategic courtroom performances. Court records unfortunately reveal few glimpses of women defendants’ behaviour during trial, such as their gestures, dress, tone of voice, and the attitudes they sought to convey with their bodies. Yet other types of sources, such as pardon petitions, illustrate that some women benefited from performing gendered respectability and penitence in the courtroom.⁶⁴ In 1876, South Carolina Governor Daniel Henry Chamberlain pardoned Henrietta Reed, a young African American nurse convicted of larceny, after he received a petition from the judge and other citizens praising Reed’s ‘modest deportment’ during her trial.⁶⁵ Governor Chamberlain also pardoned Julia Fraser, a Black woman convicted of larceny, in 1875 after the judge wrote to say he ‘was touched by the evidence of penitence and shame exhibited by the defendant’.⁶⁶ Although juries convicted these defendants, the language in the successful pardon petitions proves that women’s courtroom behaviour had a significant impact on officials’ dispositions towards them. Conversely, women who did not perform respectability and penitence in court sometimes drew the ire of judges and juries. Perhaps they were scared or angry that they had been wrongly accused. Other defendants perhaps had not yet learned the rules of courtroom etiquette because of their youth.

Although nineteenth-century Americans recognised and even romanticised childhood as a separate stage of life, South Carolina had no juvenile courts in this period and Whites typically did not apply conceptions of childhood to African American children.⁶⁷ Rather than viewing Black children on trial as vulnerable, White officials often treated them like small adults.⁶⁸ Some officials reacted with severity if they perceived that Black girls failed to perform racial deference. In 1886, a judge sentenced Rose Garrison, a ‘young colored girl’, to ten years in the penitentiary for larceny. In a pardon petition that the governor only granted after Garrison had already been imprisoned for five years, her attorney explained that Garrison ‘had been rather impudent and pert at the trial, which probably caused the Judge to be more severe in imposing sentence than he otherwise would have been’.⁶⁹

Black girls were also vulnerable to Whites’ tendency to frame their childish mischief as criminality. An especially troubling example is thirteen-year-old Ola Riley’s 1900 trial in Oconee County. In his testimony, a White man, Meyers, described leaving his house for a walk with his wife. On their way, they passed Ola and Thomas Riley, two of their Black neighbour Reuben Riley’s children. Meyers ‘cut through the woods’ back to his unlocked house, where he heard Ola in ‘the front room’. Seeing her start to climb out of a window, he ‘grabbed her by the leg and jerked her out on the ground’. Ola ‘had a lap full of eggs in her apron and as she fell[,] she busted them all over her clothes’. Meanwhile Meyers heard eleven-year-old Tom Riley ‘run out of the house’. Meyers angrily ‘carried’ Ola to her parents. They told him, as her father later testified in court, that they would give Ola ‘1,000 lashes for going in the house’ and ‘make it up’ to Meyers. But Meyers refused an informal settlement. Instead, he charged Ola and Tom Riley with stealing two dozen eggs valued at a paltry thirty cents. The jury found Ola alone guilty, and the young girl spent a year in the penitentiary. Although Ola’s parents tried to assure Meyers that they would discipline their daughter and repay him for the broken eggs, Meyers rejected their attempts to frame her offence as the misbehaviour, or hunger, of a child.⁷⁰

As today, the moments when people choose to refer conflicts to the law reveal much about cultural ideas of criminality. Many White southerners like Meyers saw young Black girls as proper subjects for the criminal court and the penitentiary. If a White girl Ola’s age had snuck into an unlocked house to steal a lapful of eggs, she would probably have been scolded and the offended party would have reached an agreement with her parents rather than going to the law.

White women and the racialisation of larceny

Although Black and White women alike were resourceful in defending themselves and managing their cases, they faced very different obstacles. White womanhood could serve as a useful defence in and of itself, laden as it was with ideological weight in the post-Civil War South. The idealised respectable, middle-class White woman was virtuous, domestic, and worthy of White men’s protection. Although many White women did work for pay and become active in politics, White southerners imagined respectable White women as sheltered from the public sphere.⁷¹ For a middle-class or elite White woman, it ‘would be disagreeable to appear in the courtroom’, as a White woman from Columbia wrote in 1894.⁷² One well-to-do White man discontinued a case in part because his teenage daughters were ‘crying’ and ‘begging to be released from appearing in court’ to testify.⁷³ The courtroom was a highly public space, something of a spectacle for people of all classes.⁷⁴ Meanwhile the ideologies surrounding White womanhood called for respectable White women to centre their lives around the home. Most White southerners, including White justices and constables, did not believe that respectable White women belonged in the courtroom as criminal defendants. Tellingly, justices and constables as well as the clerks who recorded witnesses’ testimony and prepared court documents referred to White women on trial as ‘Mrs’. or ‘Miss’. In so doing, they showed White woman defendants a gendered respect that Whites rarely offered to Black women of any class, whether Black women were in court as defendants, witnesses, or even complainants.⁷⁵

For that matter, some officials expressed scepticism when Black women charged others with the theft of their property. In an 1880 case that she eventually dropped, Catherine Springs, a Black widow, reported Marcia Davis, a Black woman, to a Charleston JP. Springs believed Davis had stolen seventy-five dollars’ worth of jewellery from her house. The justice questioned Catherine Springs about why she had so much property in her house, suggesting he viewed her as an unlikely complainant. Perhaps he even meant to imply that Springs had obtained the jewellery through illegal means herself. Springs, a modestly successful Charleston merchant, wryly replied that she ‘has and keeps much, being the proprietress of a store, which is a part of her dwelling house’.⁷⁶

In addition, the racialisation of property crime made White southerners reluctant to frame White women’s theft as larceny. White women accused of theft were overwhelmingly among the working poor and the items they took, as for Black women, reflected their material deprivations and aspirations to improve their lives. Poor White women also primarily appropriated food, clothing, and household items. Theft was therefore gendered in ways that transcended the colour line. But juries only rarely convicted even poor White women of larceny and, importantly, their neighbours usually did not interpret their thefts as criminal in the first place.

Most White women accused of theft were first or second-generation immigrants. In Charleston, 60% of whose White working-class population was foreign-born in 1860, White women tried for larceny tended to come from Germany or Ireland, which might suggest nativist prejudice.⁷⁷ However, fellow White immigrants were the ones who usually accused immigrant women of larceny. A jury acquitted Catherine Kenney of Charleston on a larceny charge in 1868 and again in 1870, when a woman accused her of stealing ‘three feather pillows’. In both cases, Kenney’s accuser was, like her, an Irish immigrant.⁷⁸ In 1893, Martin Berger, a Russian Jewish man who ran a cigar store in Charleston, charged his employee Anne Gettmann and her daughter Lottie, German immigrants, with stealing and hawking twenty-four boxes of cigars from his shop.⁷⁹ In short, although the reasons for their greater litigiousness against women of their own race and class need further study, White immigrants reported White immigrant women for theft at greater rates than did native-born White South Carolinians.

However, all the above cases ended in acquittals, a reflection of juries’ general reluctance to convict native-born or immigrant White women of larceny. There were certainly exceptions. Juries convicted several poor White women in rural counties of larceny and livestock theft, though judges sentenced them to the county jail rather than the penitentiary.⁸⁰ But juries acquitted other White women even when the evidence was persuasive. In the Gettmanns’ trial, for example, a jury acquitted the German-born mother and her daughter even after witnesses testified that they had bought some of Martin Berger’s distinctive cigars from the women. Charleston juries twice exonerated Irish immigrant Mary Ann Mahoney, who was once caught in possession of a stolen necklace with a unique pattern.⁸¹

Native-born White southerners often framed respectable White women’s thefts as desperate rather than criminal, and so these incidents never entered the legal system. Because court records, by definition, tell the stories of people who did turn to the law, it is difficult to find evidence that ‘respectable’ White southern women sometimes stole yet escaped being charged with larceny, but other types of sources provide examples of such incidences. In 1871, Alice Larkins Houston, a thirty-year-old White woman, was the widowed proprietress of a boardinghouse in Wilmington, North Carolina. In her diary, Houston described an incident which ‘will set me back greatly in my business’. Seventy-five dollars went missing from her pocketbook. A detective ‘made nothing of the facts’, but Houston soon discovered the culprit herself. It was one of her visitors, a White woman she considered a friend. ‘Is everybody vile and deceitful and treacherous?’ Houston asked her diary. Yet Alice Houston ultimately felt sympathy for the other woman, who had struggled financially since the Civil War and had to care for her ‘little innocent children’. ‘I do feel so sorry for her’, she wrote. ‘It must have been dire want that caused her to commit such an act … poor tempted creature—had she only asked me for the money I would have saved her from the sin of stealing it’. Houston resolved to send the woman a note ‘containing a strong intimidation that her absence is decidedly more preferable to me than her presence’. To further shield the women’s identity, Houston wrote her name in her diary as ‘Mrs.—’.⁸²

Despite her own financial difficulties, Alice Houston determined not to ‘expose’ the theft. Her response was instead to write a strongly-worded letter, distancing herself from her former friend socially. There is no reason to assume her reaction was unique. White Southerners avoided framing White women’s theft as criminal not only because of its potentially disturbing ideological implications for White supremacy, which held that White women were virtuous and needed protection, but also because most White Southerners more easily empathised with and forgave White people who they imagined as being like themselves.

Conclusion

In 1882, South Carolina legislators amended the state constitution to disenfranchise men who had been convicted of ‘burglary, larceny, perjury, forgery, and any infamous crime’. In practice, officials primarily employed the law to disenfranchise Black men. The amendment represented an ominous step towards 1895, when South Carolina unambiguously stripped Black men of the vote they had won during Reconstruction.⁸³ Black women had no suffrage rights. Yet it would be a mistake to think the racialisation of larceny only affected Black women by proxy. After the fall of Reconstruction in 1876, legislators in South Carolina and other southern states weaponised criminal law to not only disenfranchise Black men but also to construct profitable convict labour regimes in which incarcerated African American men and women worked in dangerous conditions.

Moreover, White Democratic legislators conspicuously fought to increase the penalties for property crimes, for which courts disproportionately accused and convicted poor Black southerners. In 1877, South Carolina’s first post-Reconstruction legislature steepened the legal penalty proscribed for larceny and even proposed a bill that would make both arson and burglary capital offenses. The Republican minority protested. A White Republican legislature member declared, ‘I have searched the criminal codes of the different states and of the world … and I have found no provisions in any of them such as are contained in this bill’.⁸⁴ In March 1878, the legislature finally reached a decision, amending the proposed bill so that arson, rape, and murder would be capital crimes, while anyone convicted of burglary would be ‘imprisoned in the state penitentiary with hard labor during the lifetime of the prisoner’.⁸⁵

In practice, punitive South Carolina officials and judges in the later decades of the nineteenth century also began interpreting burglary more liberally, so that Black men and women who might once have been charged with larceny now faced burglary charges even if they had not technically broken into a building. In an especially egregious example, in 1886, an Oconee County jury convicted Lucy Southerland, a very young Black girl, of burglary. Lucy’s ‘crime’ had been to go into her parents’ White employer’s unlocked kitchen at night and take ‘one tin bucket filled with lard of the value of one dollar’, which she then carried back to her parents’ house. The judge in the case sentenced the child to two years in the penitentiary ‘at such labor as she is able to perform’.⁸⁶

Post-Reconstruction criminal statutes and convict labour systems that harshly punished property crimes by African Americans, Jim Crow racial oppression, severely restricted economic opportunities, and the suspicions of White employers combined to make Black women domestics especially vulnerable to larceny accusations and, for those who were convicted, draconian punishments. In 1880, fifteen-year-old Louisa Esley, employed as a child nurse for a White family, lived the nightmare of many African American women who worked as domestics. A large sum of money disappeared from her employer’s house overnight, while Esley slept near her young charge. Despite the lack of evidence, a judge, acting according to the new post-Reconstruction statute, sentenced Louisa Esley to life in prison for burglary, although she had demonstrably not broken into her employer’s house. Indeed, she had not stolen anything at all. After Esley had spent five long years incarcerated in the state penitentiary, a man confessed to the theft for which she had been convicted. The governor finally pardoned Esley.⁸⁷ Anxieties about such false accusations surely weighed heavily on the shoulders of many Black women.

As for the poor and working-class Black and White women in the postbellum South who did in fact appropriate others’ property, they overwhelmingly did so to stave off hunger and poverty, improve their lives, or take compensation they felt was justly owed to them. Cooks took extra food home from employers’ kitchens and laundresses withheld customers’ clothing until they were paid for their labour. Women’s difficult decisions to take extra food from their workplace or even an impulsive decision to grab an employer’s discarded ‘cherry-colored satin sailor’s waist dress’ to wear to a party reveal moments of ordinary women’s lives, struggles, and desires.⁸⁸

Importantly, many women ably constructed a legal defence by using a striking variety of tactics. Even from county jails, they bargained with complainants through intermediaries or letters. Women defendants related culturally resonant and convincing narratives in the courtroom that sought to plant doubt in jurors’ minds. Despite the increasingly punitive nature of the South’s racialised criminal justice system as many of Reconstruction’s gains were eroded by the entrenchment of the Jim Crow legal order, Black women on trial also strategically and sometimes successfully defended themselves.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. Special thanks also to John David Smith and Carol Higham for their insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Katherine Hicks

Hannah Katherine Hicks is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of the Civil War Era at Pennsylvania State University’s George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. She received her PhD in U.S. History from Vanderbilt University in 2022 and previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is working on a book manuscript about poor and working-class Black and White women who stood trial as criminal defendants in southern courts after the Civil War. Her work has appeared in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

Notes

1 State vs Hannah Langston and Louisa Pitts, Laurens County Court of General Sessions Indictments (CGSI), February 1879, box 32, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (hereafter SCDAH).

2 A seminal work is J.M. Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History 8, no. 4 (1975): 80–116, 80.

3 The six South Carolina counties surveyed were Charleston, Richland, Laurens, Marlboro, Clarendon, and Oconee counties. This research is part of a larger project about women and criminal courts in the U.S. South.

4 Larceny meant theft that did not involve a perpetrator breaking into a home or another building to steal property, which would have constituted burglary. Similarly, larceny did not refer to cases where a perpetrator used force to steal from someone’s person (‘highway robbery’ or possibly ‘privily stealing from the person’). In nineteenth-century South Carolina, statutes characterised theft of property valued at $20 or less as ‘petit’ or petty larceny, whereas stealing property of greater value could mean a charge of ‘grand larceny’ and steeper sentences if convicted. Because South Carolina legislators revised statutes regarding property crimes and changed legal penalties multiple times between 1865 and 1900, this article largely avoids discussing specific types of charges. Instead, I am more interested in women’s experiences and legal strategies.

5 See Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Tammy Whitlock, Crime, Gender, and Consumer Culture in Victorian England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005).

6 See Leigh-Anne Francis, ‘Steal or Starve: Black Women’s Criminal Work in New York City, 1893–1914’, Journal of Women’s History 32, no. 4 (2020): 13–37, 14; Alana Piper, ‘Us Girls Won’t Put One Another Away’: Relations among Melbourne’s Prostitute Pickpockets, 1860–1920’, Women’s History Review 27, no. 2 (2018): 247–65; William Meier, ‘Going on the Hoist: Women, Work, and Shoplifting in London, ca. 1890–1940’, Journal of British Studies 50, no. 2 (2011): 410–33.

7 Pippa Holloway, ‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote: Disfranchisement for Larceny in the South, 1874–1890’, Journal of Southern History 75, no. 4 (2009): 931–62, 944–5, 950.

8 Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Matthew Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996); Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008).

9 Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kali Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

10 Alex Lichtenstein, ‘That Disposition to Theft, With Which They Have Been Branded’: Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law’, Journal of Social History 21, no. 3 (1988): 413–40, 413. For enslavement as theft of the body, see Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81, 67.

11 This figure does not include cases where the defendant’s identity could not be confirmed in the census or other records.

12 City of Charleson Yearbook, 1882 (Charleston, 1882), South Carolina Historical Society.

13 Laura Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the 19th-Century United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

14 Bernard E. Powers, Jr., ‘African Americans’, in South Carolina Encyclopedia (2016), ed. Walter B. Edgar, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/african-americans/ (accessed April 15, 2024).

15 Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 118.

16 Wilbert Jenkins, Seizing the New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 99. In 1870s Charleston, for example, about 50% of adult Black women worked for wages according to the census, compared to about 14% of adult White women.

17 W.J. Megginson, African American Life in South Carolina’s Upper Piedmont, 1780–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 320.

18 Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 66.

19 Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (New York: New Press, 2018), 65–6.

20 Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 187–8, 205–11; Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 74–7.

21 Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 174.

22 Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

23 State vs Margaret McEvoy, Charleston CGSI, June 1869, box 17, #1160, SCDAH.

24 Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 261.

25 Sharpless, Cooking, 71.

26 Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, 50–9; Sharpless, Cooking, 89–92.

27 Sharpless, Cooking, 70.

28 Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, 137; Sharpless, Cooking, 74.

29 Pardon Petition of Ida Byas, Gov. Ellerbe Pardon Petitions, folder 40; State vs Ida Byas, Richland County CGSI, June 1898, box 47, #3232, SCDAH.

30 Kali Gross, ‘African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection’, Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 25–33, 28.

31 State vs May Gaillard, Charleston County CGSI, November 1893, box 40, #7734; State vs Rebecca Jane Maxwell, Charleston County CGSI, June 1893, box 40, #7560, SCDAH. Maxwell, the nurse, won an acquittal in the attempted poisoning case.

32 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 167–70.

33 An example is State vs Emma Thomas, Richland County CGSI, February 1869, box 1, #128, SCDAH.

34 State vs Patience Jamison, Richland County CGSI, October 1899, box 48, #3367, SCDAH.

35 State vs Elizabeth, John, and William Whiteman, Oconee County CGSI, March 1885, box 3, SCDAH.

36 State vs Mary Fricks, Oconee CGSI, November 1871, box 1, SCDAH.

37 State vs Hester Alexander, Richland County CGSI, October 1891, box 44, #2443, SCDAH.

38 State vs Louisa Wilson, Charleston County CGSI, June 1869, box 18, #1179, SCDAH. In this example from Charleston, Anna Chambers, a freedwoman, accused Louisa Wilson, also Black, of taking ‘a skirt valued at one dollar, the property of Lottie Henderson’ from her backyard. Chambers worked as a laundress and had left her client’s skirt outside to wash or dry it. She soon dropped the case against Wilson.

39 Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back, 3.

40 Kytle and Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden, 58.

41 State vs Patsy McLaurin and Harriet Stewart, Marlboro County CGSI, July 1867, box 2, #848 and #867, SCDAH.

42 State vs Nancy Redman, Oconee County CGSI, March 1870, box 1, SCDAH.

43 For a discussion of freedpeople’s and White northerners’ differing ideas about the proper clothing for African American Civil War refugees which helped me think through this issue, see Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 157–73.

44 Kytle and Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden, 34–5; Abstracts of Criminal Cases from 1867 to 1868, Charleston District Court Records, SCDAH.

45 Stephanie McCurry, ‘Women Numerous and Armed: The Confederate Food Riots in Historical Perspective’, OAH Magazine of History 27, no. 2 (2013): 35–9.

46 Leslie Schwalm, ‘Sweet Dreams of Freedom’: Freedwomen’s Reconstruction of Life and Labor in Lowcountry South Carolina’, Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 1 (1997): 9–38, 9, 25–6.

47 Edwards, Only the Clothes, 211–232.

48 State vs Sallie and Maggie Deas, Clarendon County CGSI, May 1892, box 4, SCDAH.

49 State vs Francina James, Richland County CGSI, June 1896, box 46, #2876, SCDAH.

50 Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days Among the Contrabands (Boston, 1893), 52–3. See also Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 68–9.

51 Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake (New York: Random House, 2021), 267.

52 State vs Susan Rothele, Oconee County CGSI, June 1873, box 1, SCDAH.

53 State vs Caroline Robinson, Charleston County CGSI, June 1885, box 35, #6191, SCDAH.

54 State vs Florence Miller, Charleston County CGSI, November 1897, box 43, #9162, SCDAH.

55 State vs Frances McAlister, Marlboro County CGSI, July 1867, box 1, #799; State vs George Webster, Marlboro County CGSI, July 1867, box 1, #820, SCDAH.

56 Kimberly Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 31–2.

57 State vs Sallie Chastain, Oconee County CGSI, July 1890, box 4, SCDAH.

58 State vs Ella Williams, Richland County CGSI, April 1900, box 48, #3447, SCDAH.

59 State vs Fanny Washington, Charleston County CGSI, September 1870, box 20, #1841, SCDAH.

60 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 3. For ‘storytelling’ in southern courtrooms, see Welch, Black Litigants, 30–5, 54.

61 Complainants sometimes inflated the value of stolen items.

62 State vs Katy Alford, Marlboro County CGSI, September 1883, box 6, #1499, SCDAH.

63 A similar case is State vs Sallie Hill, Marlboro County CGSI, September 1885, box 6, #1627, SCDAH. Hill, a young Black woman on trial for larceny, testified that a mysterious Black ‘boy by the name of Peter’ had been the one to take the dresses and women’s underclothing. However, Hill’s jury found her guilty.

64 For a rhetorician’s analysis of women’s courtroom ‘performance’ in prominent nineteenth-century trials, see A. Cheree Carlson, The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in A Court of Law (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

65 Pardon Petition of Henrietta Reed, Gov. Chamberlain Pardon Book, 64, SCDAH.

66 Pardon Petition of Julia Fraser, Gov. Chamberlain Pardon Book, 89, SCDAH.

67 Cynthia Greenlee finds officials and communities took Black girls’ ‘tender age’ into account in some cases, though inconsistently, in ‘Due to Her Tender Age’: Black Girls and Childhood on Trial in South Carolina, 1885–1920’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 2014).

68 Tera Eva Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). For late-nineteenth-century Americans’ conceptualisations of childhood, see Susan Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in the Gilded Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

69 Pardon Petition of Rose Garrison, Gov. Richardson Pardon Petitions, SCDAH.

70 State vs Ola and Thomas Riley, Oconee County CGSI, November 1900, box 6, SCDAH.

71 Barbara Welke, ‘When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914’, Law & History Review 13, no. 2 (1995): 261–316, 265–77.

72 State vs Emily Jenkins, Richland County CGSI, June 1894, box 45, #2681, SCDAH.

73 State vs Caroline Robinson.

74 See Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 70–1, for respectable White southern women on trial as ‘spectacle’.

75 However, Black southerners did refer to Black women as ‘Mrs’. and ‘Miss’. See Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 186.

76 State vs Marcia Davis, Charleston County CGSI, June 1881, box 31, #4580, SCDAH.

77 Jenkins, Seizing the New Day, 3.

78 Abstracts of Criminal Cases from 1867 to 1868, Charleston District Court Records; State vs Catherine Kenney, Charleston County CGSI, February 1870, box 19, #1472, SCDAH.

79 State vs Lottie Gettmann and Anne Gettmann, Charleston County CGSI, November 1893, box 40, #7652, SCDAH.

80 See State vs Nancy Redman; State vs Elizabeth Whiteman.

81 State vs Mrs. M.A. Mahoney, Charleston County CGSI, June 1879, box 30, #4269; November 1884, box 34, #6028, SCDAH.

82 Alice Lee Larkins Houston Diary, March 15 & 18, 1871, Alice Lee Larkins Houston Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC Chapel Hill.

83 Holloway, ‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote’, 944–5, 950.

84 ‘Condensed Report of Legislative Proceedings’, Edgefield Advertiser (Edgefield, SC), May 17, 1877.

85 Acts and Joint Resolutions of the General Assembly of South Carolina, Passed at the Regular Session of 1883 (Columbia, 1884), 290.

86 State vs Lucy Southerland, Oconee County CGSI, March 1886, box 3, SCDAH.

87 Pardon Petition of Louisa Esley, Pardon Book of Hugh Smith Thompson, 258–9, SCDAH.

88 State vs Mary Muchaplease, Oconee County CGSI, November 1889, box 4, SCDAH.