Doug
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JURIES AND OPRAH
Ignored by every slavery historian, by Oprah Winfrey's new film Beloved as well as by the current traveling exhibit on slavery shown in public libraries, is the possibility that slavery might have been resolved peaceably through trials by jury - without war, without KKK, without proclamation of emancipation. No "Thirteenth Amendment" needed!
This is the contention of our friend Godfrey D. Lehman, author of We The Jury (Prometheus Books), one chapter of which shows how northern juries, particularly in Massachusetts, did just that 80 years earlier. In a group of trials extending over about 13 years, culminating in a series of four, between 1781 and 1783, juries, although consisting exclusively of white men, decreed that "They in Africa had the Same Right to enslave us."
John Adams, as vice-president in 1795, reminisced about pre-Revolutionary experiences in a letter to Rev. Jeremy Belknap that A never knew a Jury by a Verdict to determine a Negro to be a slave. They always found them free." The "mortal blow" was struck in 1783 when a jury had been asked to interpret a clause in the new Massachusetts state consistitution [sic] declaring that all men were born free as covering blacks as well as whites. The jury - albeit twelve white men unhesitatingly decreed that it did. As a result, "escaped" slave Quock Walker, seized and beaten by his putative master, was set free, and the institution lost all legal support in the state.
Lehman, whose in-progress fourth book on the jury includes a chapter on southern juries, observes that it is the more surprising not that a majority of panels upheld slavery, but that there were as many as there were - again white men only which rejected it. Recall that many panels called "juries" were stacked exclusively with slaveholders, and blacks were often not permitted to offer testimony.
According to Lehman, an ardent promoter of jury nullification, as are we, "the tantalizing question is: Would southern juries have followed the Massachusetts pattern had they been true juries - that is not stacked, fully informed of the evidence and their powers, and not judicially dominated. There is evidence this was happening in some states".