A Personal Act of Reparation

December 16, 2019 6:12 AM

The long aftermath of a North Carolina man’s decision to deed a plot of land to his former slaves.

In 1870, Asa Fitzgerald transferred land to the people formerly enslaved by him and his wife's family, as payment for services rendered. Fitzgerald died eight years later, and his widow immediately sued for the land's return. Unsurprisingly, the legal system of post-Civil War North Carolina did everything it could to restore white supremacy with total disregard for precedent and logic, essentially ruling that wanting to make reparations was in and of itself evidence of insanity.

posted by Etrigan (8 comments total)

Courts trying to declare a person insane because they are trying to own up to their own actions and do the right thing is the most American thing I've read today. It's still a hallmark of our current justice system.
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:49 AM on December 16, 2019 [30 favorites]

Thanks for posting this, Etrigan. That was a really fascinating and frustrating and infuriating read.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:11 AM on December 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

Other reminder the slaveowners won.
posted by The Whelk at 10:11 AM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is reminds me of some of the shit Michael Shiner dealt with ("Shiner writes his wife Phillis and their three children 'wher snacht away from me and sold' on the street of Washington by slave dealers and confined to a slave pen in Alexandria"). A little more in his diary excerpt here. Fortunately in this case he had some powerful friends.
posted by exogenous at 11:14 AM on December 16, 2019 [6 favorites]

What an excellent article; its language, its structure, and its arguments all most calculated to persuade the disinterested reader.

I, too, cannot believe that Asa was mad. The excerpts from his conveyance have none of the florid strokes that typically accompany disordered thinking. In its phrasing and precedents it gives no ground to those who would justify enslavement: by describing Asa's wealth as “the proceeds of their labor which has come into our hands” it undercuts slave holders' supposed entitlement while being in no way polemical. As the article makes clear, there were no legitimate grounds to overturn it: by doing so, the court did as great a violence on the body of the law as it did to the poor wretches whose captivity it formerly approved. The whole Confederacy was rotten, root to crown; the soil must be dug up and the earth cleansed.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:38 PM on December 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is an outstanding read. I've been thinking about it all day.

A line from the final paragraph that's been haunting me: "In Asa’s mind, fundamental changes to the racial order still seemed imaginable, even as they were being violently contested by white reactionaries. It was still possible to believe that the rest of the world might catch up to him."
posted by mixedmetaphors at 5:39 PM on December 16, 2019

But the outcome violated the property rights of the black kinfolk who held legal title to the land in an even more shocking fashion. The decree was an astonishingly punitive act against a group who had done nothing wrong.

The court was punishing the defendants for having the temerity to defend themselves in the first place; the severity of the punishment gives some indication of the bravery that Isaac Allman and his fellow landowners must've demonstrated. It probably isn't taking liberties to say that they were risking a hell of a lot to stand up for themselves. But they did so anyway. That took guts.
posted by Anonymous at 5:58 PM on December 16, 2019

This is a hell of a history and I guess I ought to send Lapham's some money.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:35 PM on December 17, 2019