Presentation
Bearing Witness: African Americans and Infanticide Investigations in the Nineteenth-Century South
Law and Society Association annual conference
(2013)
Abstract
Presentation given at the Law and Society Association annual conference, Boston, MA.
In March 1826, the Pitt County Superior County of North Carolina, sentenced a young woman, Rehny Joiner, to prison. At only six months, Joiner’s jail terms may seem relatively short. Yet, incarceration for any length of time, particularly sentences handed down to women, were unusual in North Carolina during the antebellum period. Unless women had committed a crime so heinous that it warranted the death penalty, few—if any—women were ever incarcerated. As communities usually had only one jail, reserved for men, communities faced practical difficulties in jailing women, and local people generally disliked doing so believing that prison was unsuitable for women, even if they were convicted of a crime. Therefore, Rehney Joiner’s sentence of six months suggested that the community felt sufficiently wronged by her crime that incarceration was necessary.
Rehney Joiner’s crime was infanticide. Crucial to the jury’s finding of guilt, and by extension Joiner’s sentence, had been information provided by several African American women in the community. Local black women, enslaved and free, had been involved in the search for Joiner’s dead baby, and later testified at the inquest conducted over the infant’s body. As this paper will illustrate, inquests served as a crucial site for the creation and production of narratives about infant murder, narratives that then entered the courtroom. Although North Carolina law, like laws in all Southern states, precluded the African-American women who participated in the inquest over Rehney Joiner’s dead infant from testifying in court, the evidence they gave became part of the narrative that explained the infant’s death and identified Joiner as culpable. That narrative was then repeated and recirculated in court by white witnesses, thereby contributing to the jury’s eventual finding.
Drawing on instances of infanticide from North Carolina, this paper illustrates how investigations into infant death in the antebellum U.S. provided an arena in which the testimony of black Southerners sometimes assumed a privileged status within the community. Decisions about the guilt and innocence of black and white women were made by community leaders based on the authority jurors vested in information provided by African Americans. The significance of local knowledge and information therefore enabled black Southerners—enslaved and free—to claim an important role in the legal processes within the communities of which they were a part. Although excluded by virtue of race from full participation in many “formal” activities of the law, venues outside the courtroom—such as inquests—provided opportunities for the incorporation and inclusion of African Americans in nineteenth century legal processes.
Disciplines
Publication Date
June 1, 2013
Location
Boston, MA
Citation Information
Felicity Turner. "Bearing Witness: African Americans and Infanticide Investigations in the Nineteenth-Century South" Law and Society Association annual conference (2013) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/felicity-turner/23/