Abstract
The Reconstruction Era has garnered renewed attention from legal historians and scholars of the critical race tradition. Yet Reconstruction’s central institutional actor, the Freedmen’s Bureau—a federal agency created to aid emancipated persons’ transition to freedom—has largely eluded theoretical scrutiny. Building upon legal scholarship on Reconstruction, this Essay pans focus away from public law and towards the minutia of private law, contract law specifically, wherein the racialization of jurisprudence in the aftermath of slavery has largely gone undetected. This Essay expands the traditional boundaries of political theory by reading case briefs as a genre of political thought and contributes to the legal history field by exploring the interplay of race, contract law, and liberal legalism in the late nineteenth century. Consequently, this Essay traces the institutional emergence and commitments of ad hoc Freedmen’s courts—Reconstruction Era courts with federal jurisdiction over civil and criminal legal matters involving freedmen—to interrogate the racial philosophy of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the context of private law.
This Essay uses Bill, Charles, Jupiter, Randolph, et al. v. William A. Carr, Leon Cty., Fla. (1866), a breach of contract case between fifty-six freedmen and their former plantation owner, to appraise the application of the liberal theory of contract to Black labor collectives. Employing the historian’s method of microhistory, the Essay considers Bill et al.—a rare, comprehensive case file from a Freedmen’s court in Tallahassee, Florida—ripe for political-theoretic reflection. The Essay argues that, while a burgeoning rights-based legal landscape was underway during Reconstruction, the freedmen’s right to contract, if an exercise of autonomy and will, was constrained by administrative mandates of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the attending corporeal violence of the plantation economy. This Essay further contends that these institutional aims were extended to the Freedmen’s courts where, as in Bill et al., jurists’ treatment of race wedded with nineteenth century contract jurisprudence calcified relations of indebtedness and obligation in the afterlife of slavery, therein making Freedmen’s court trials “juridical occasions for racial formation.
