ey were
informal and largely ignorant of the law, and they were so quickly convened
after the discovery of a crime that the shock of the deed had no time to
wane. Such virtues as they sometimes had lay merely in their personnel.
The slaveholders of the vicinage who commonly comprised the court were
intimately and more or less tolerantly acquainted with negro nature in
general, and usually doubtless with the prisoner on trial. Their judgment
was therefore likely to be that of informed and interested neighbors, not
of jurors carefully selected for ignorance and indifference, a judgment
guided more by homely common sense than by the particularities of the law.
Their task was difficult, as anyone acquainted with the rambling, mumbling,
confused and baffling character of plantation negro testimony will easily
believe; and the convictions and acquittals were of course oftentimes
erroneous. The remodeling of the system was one of the reforms called for
by Southerners of the time but never accomplished. Mistaken acquittals by
these courts were beyond correction, for in the South slaves like freemen
could not be twice put in jeopardy for the same offense. Their convictions,
on the other hand, were sometimes set aside by higher courts on appeal, or
their sentences estopped from execution by the governor's pardon.[23] The
thoroughness with which some of the charges against negroes were considered
is illustrated in two cases tried before the county court at Newbern, North
Carolina, in 1826. In one of these a negro boy was acquitted of highway
robbery after the jury's deliberation of several hours; in the other the
jury on the case of a free negro woman charged with infanticide had been
out for forty-six hours without reaching a verdict when the newspaper
dispatch was written.[24]

[Footnote 23: The working of these courts and the current criticisms of
them are illustrated in H.M. Henry _The Police Control of the Slave in
South Carolina_, pp. 58-65.]

[Footnote 24: News item from Newbern, N.C., in the Charleston _City
Gazette_, May 9, 1826.]

The circuit and supreme courts of the several states, though the slave
cases which they tried were for the most part concerned only with such dry
questions as detinue, trover, bailment, leases, inheritance and reversions,
in which the personal quality of the negroes was largely ignored,
occasionally rendered decisions of vivid human interest even where matters
of mere property were nominally