Gillmer on Black, White, and Gold: Litigating Slavery in the American West @GonzagaLaw

Jason Gillmer, Gonzaga University School of Law, has published Black, White, and Gold: Litigating Slavery in the American West. Here is the abstract.

In May 1852, Charles Perkins decided he wanted his slaves back. Perkins was from Mississippi, but in 1849 he caught gold fever and moved to California in search of easy fortune. When he came, like hundreds of others from the southern states, he also brought an enslaved man with him, and later had two others sent from his family’s plantation. In 1851, following California’s admission to the Union as a free state, Perkins returned to his home in Mississippi, leaving the three men behind. A year later they were in court, litigating the question of whether California’s recently enacted Fugitive Slave Act—which promised the resources of the state to help slaveholders recover their slaves—was constitutional, and with it the larger issue of whether slavery could exist on free soil. The answer, provided five years before Dred Scott, foreshadowed the coming of the Civil War, and firmly planted the West in the middle of the national debate over race, slavery, and the law. This paper is a narrative history of In re Perkins, the case involving Charles Perkins and the three men he maintained were his slaves. In takes place during the Gold Rush and the decade that followed, and it has two primary goals. First, by centering a story about slavery in the American West, it provides a critical lens through which we can explore how the ideological conflicts animating the North-South axis also extended horizontally to the Pacific Ocean. With rare exception, scholars of American slavery and those of the West do not engage in the type of rich discussions that allow for the West to be brought into the national discourse over slavery and the growing sectional crisis. Yet, as In re Perkins demonstrates, these issues very much shaped both the experiences of those who settled the area and the positions of those back east. Second, as a narrative history, this paper also affords an opportunity to dig down deep into the main participants in the case and reconsider who we think the makers and interpreters of the law are. Unlike like most legal histories, which place primary emphasis on court decisions and legislative enactments, the focus here is on how the law was experienced on a local and more nuanced level. By shifting the emphasis from the high courts to the county courtrooms, this paper is part of a larger story of how people of color and their allies turned to the courts in an effort to protect their rights in ways that have not always been understood or appreciated.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.