While reading through an artificial collection at the Library of Virginia containing extant (and frustratingly incomplete) court records from Civil War-era Richmond, I happened upon several sets of documents related to very different crimes that occurred in the same neighborhood, a few months apart.[2] These documents reflect a familiar truth about race and justice: the judicial system that subjected free and enslaved Black Richmonders to harsh sentences simultaneously treated white criminality with astonishing leniency – at least when the victims of white criminality were Black. Read together, however, the surviving documents from these ostensibly discrete cases also suggest a more complicated and intriguing possibility: Black Richmonders, well aware of the white supremacy inherent in Richmond’s legal system, may have pursued extrajudicial efforts to enact punishment for white crimes against African Americans.
One of the cases involved Curtis and Jacob, two enslaved men, and Richard Drew, a free Black man. All three were arrested on October 15, 1864, accused by a white shopkeeper of breaking into his store the previous night and stealing foodstuffs, cloth and clothing, and other commercial goods totaling $3230 in value. On October 19, the white mayor ordered the accused held in jail until the trial date, which he set for the following month. When the case was heard on November 14, the shopkeeper and two of the arresting police officers recounted finding the stolen goods hidden in and around the stable where the Black men worked. Based on this testimony, Curtis and Richard Drew were convicted. Curtis was transported out of state for sale (with his owner to be compensated $4000). Richard Drew was sold into slavery. Jacob, the other enslaved man, was deemed not to have participated in the burglary and discharged from the court system.[3] As devastating as enslavement must have been for Richard Drew and forced removal from the community must have been for Curtis, such harsh sentences might not strike historians as exceptional, given the decades and centuries of legal subordination of free and enslaved Black Richmonders.[4] White property rights were consistently privileged over Black personhood, with the former so subsuming the latter that even free Blacks were routinely reduced by the courts to becoming white property.