Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862. By Judith Kelleher Schafer. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xxvi, 204. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8071-2880-5; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-2862-7.)

Decades of intensive research about

slavery have yielded such a huge and multifaceted historiography that it might seem impossible to discover any new primary sources or educe any fresh insights. Judith Kelleher Schafer proves otherwise in this innovative monograph that shows "how slaves and free people of color used the judicial system in New Orleans to gain, maintain, or surrender their freedom" (p. xxii). Not content with the usual evidentiary sources for much legal history--appellate decisions and published case reports--she digs more deeply into the less-accessible level of the trial (or "district") courts and even into the recorders' courts, where initial hearings took place. Examining more than 340 trials, Schafer demonstrates that African Americans' legal experiences in Louisiana were unusual and in two ways unique. Slaves could--and did--contract for self-purchase and litigate for freedom.

Louisiana's legislature adopted much of the repressive legislation common in other slave states after 1829, but in practice New Orleans authorities, accustomed to a stable and productive free black community and often sharing elements of francophone culture with blacks, proved lenient in granting manumission with the right to reside in Louisiana. Slaves who sued for freedom by arguing that they had sojourned on free soil prior to 1846 (when Louisiana closed the free-soil loophole) usually won favorable verdicts, despite two 1837 U.S. Supreme Court decisions that denied the validity of that argument. When the legislature tired of considering petitions for manumission and gave district courts jurisdiction, expecting few successful suits, the New Orleans courts were flooded with suits winning quick and favorable verdicts. Even the legislature showed some leniency. An 1807 law forbidding free blacks to enter and remain in the state was supplanted by an 1830 statute that granted amnesty and permission to stay for those who had entered illegally before 1826. In 1842 the amnesty was extended to those who came before 1838.

However, not even New Orleans was immune to the heightened sectional tensions of the 1850s. In 1858 the city began requiring white supervision of black churches; in 1859 the police cracked down--after years of virtual non-enforcement--on free blacks who failed to register with the mayor; and even though kidnapping free blacks was a serious felony (civil litigation proved it was an increasing practice), the city's courts prosecuted no such cases in the years 1846-1862. In 1857 the legislature banned all manumission and in 1859 adopted a statute encouraging self-enslavement of free blacks. Small wonder that in 1859-1860 about a thousand free blacks emigrated from New Orleans to Haiti or Mexico and that the wealthier among those who remained sought to protect their status by demonstrating hostility to abolition and support for the Confederacy.

Schafer demonstrates clearly the vigorous initiative of black New Orleanians, especially women. Even the few who chose enslavement were mostly illegal residents facing expulsion who were determined to stay in their chosen home and maintain family ties.

Tenacious research (newspaper coverage of courts and police activities supplements fragmentary legal records) and thorough, subtle analysis place this superlative work on the "must read" list for any historian of slavery.

Arkansas State University

DENNIS C. ROUSEY