Panel Proposal for 2010 ASLH Conference
Panel Title
Prostitution, Larceny, and Murder:
Criminal Law and Intimate Space in Post-Civil War America
Panel Participants:
Chair
Carolyn Ramsey, University of Colorado Law School, Boulder
Carolyn.Ramsey@colorado.edu
Presenters
Elizabeth Parish Smith, University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill
eps@unc.edu
Andrew T. Urban, Emory University
aturban@emory.edu
Felicity Turner, Duke University
felicity.turner@duke.edu
Comment
Kate Masur, Northwestern University
kmasur@northwestern.edu
Panel Description
This panel explores the intersections of local legal systems with intimate spaces from the
end of the Civil War to the late nineteenth century. During the latter half of the
nineteenth century, the white, middle class felt increasingly under siege. The newly
emancipated black family, waves of immigrants, women and men moving into the
workforce in record numbers, and an increasingly demanding labor force all challenged
the authority of the white middle class. Intimate spaces, such as the home and the body,
therefore became spaces that the white middle class attempted to assert power and more
closely control. In the contest over control of intimate spaces, the courts served a central
role as sites of negotiation.
Using criminal court records and newspaper reports from Reconstruction-era New
Orleans, Elizabeth Parish Smith’s paper examines the problems generated when criminal
law intersected with the intimate space shared by men and women’s bodies during sex.
Addressing the difficulties that the courts faced with securing convictions against
prostitutes for theft of client property, the paper argues that such crimes further blurred
the already murky distinctions between race, class, and gender within postemancipation
New Orleans.
Drawing on records from the Court of General Sessions in late
nineteenth-century New York, Andrew Urban explores how the criminal justice system
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enforced class-based distinctions between servant and master. Analyzing records of
alleged thefts committed within the home by servants, Urban examines how employers
and servants negotiated each other’s accusations within the constraints of the legal
process.
Finally, Felicity Turner’s paper will consider how local authorities in Reconstruction-era
used the courts to assert male prerogatives in what had traditionally been acknowledged
as a female’s domain—pregnancy and birth. In so doing, communities employed
domestic spaces like homes, where infanticide usually occurred, to embed particular
ideas about gender and race into social and legal practices.
Abstracts:
Abstract One: Elizabeth Parish Smith
“Men who go into such places ought to lose their money”:
Regulating Legal Prostitution in New Orleans, 1865-1877
New Orleans began its second experiment with legalized prostitution just months
after the end of the Civil War in 1865. Deciding to regulate rather than prohibit
prostitution, local leaders attempted to restrict its practice to four demarcated areas of the
city and convert it to a taxable industry. They had good reason to pursue such a scheme.
New Orleans already enjoyed a reputation in the postbellum period as what one historian
calls a “southern Babylon”1 due to its thriving sin industries, and city leaders hoped to
capitalize financially on prostitution while containing it to poorer, seedier parts of town.
Under this experiment, women deemed by city ordinance as “notoriously abandoned to
lewdness” were subject to a long series of byzantine laws to regulate their business and
behaviors. They also paid an annual tax. The city made additional money by collecting
fines when women violated these ordinances or were arrested by police for being drunk
or disturbing the peace—all common occurrences.
While the lower courts easily disposed of these cases, the city’s criminal court found it
notoriously difficult to convict both black and white prostitutes charged with stealing
from their clientele. One problem was social ambivalence. A local newspaper declared
that “Men who go into such places ought to lose their money.”2 A further problem was
finding corroborating witnesses to the crime. However, when convicted, prostitutes
received unusually harsh sentences, often for hard labor at the State Penitentiary. The
variation in how these cases were resolved highlights the widespread anxiety about
legalized prostitution in New Orleans. Using criminal court files, police arrest records,
and local newspapers, this paper explores the racial, sexual, and economic tensions
around legalized prostitution in the postbellum South.
1
Alecia P. Long, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans,
1865-1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).
2
“A Robbery,” Daily Picayune, New Orleans, Louisiana, 28 March 1868, 7.
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Abstract Two: Andrew Urban
Thieves in the Home:
Criminal Law, Domestic Servants, and the Maintenance of Social Boundaries
In November 1882, Sophia Clark, a twenty-year-old domestic servant, was tried and
convicted of grand larceny before the General Sessions Court in Manhattan. Clark’s
employer, Mary Purdy, had accused her servant of stealing more than $500 in clothing
and jewelry. Following her initial arrest, while searching Clark’s valise, a police officer
came upon additional items that had been reported missing from other middle class
households. As the New York media subsequently uncovered, Clark, using myriad aliases
and forged character references, had allegedly stole upwards of $20,000 from the
households where she had worked.
Using indictments, depositions, and trial transcripts from the General Sessions Court in
New York City, this paper examines the widespread fears and concerns surrounding
“dishonest servants” in the late-nineteenth century. Although middle class families relied
on servants from different class, ethnic, and racial backgrounds to provide the labor
necessary to maintaining their lifestyles, they viewed this economic relationship as one
that presented inherent risks. While professional criminals such as Clark fueled
sensational fears – larceny, the most common crime that servants were indicted for –
more commonly occurred on a smaller, often ambiguous scale. Servants regularly
claimed that the items they were accused of stealing were in actuality gifted to them or
belonged to them outright.
This paper explores how the criminal justice system dealt with servants accused of crimes
in an era when servants were typically considered to be the dependents of their
employers, with limited individual rights. In addition, this paper focuses on how judges
and juries evaluated social concepts such as respectability, criminality, and class in the
courtroom, in cases that relied solely on circumstantial evidence and pitted servants’
testimony against that of their employers.
Abstract Three: Felicity Turner
“Some said it was a black child”:
Constructing Race through Infanticide Investigations in the Reconstruction South
In January 1873, a jury of inquest gathered at Hickory Tavern in Catawba County, North
Carolina to inquire into the death of an infant. The local mayor suspected foul play.
Rumors ran rife about Julianna Lynn, the infant’s mother, who was white and unmarried.
Consequently, the mayor had sent an urgent message to the coroner, Rubin Yoder,
demanding an investigation. Witnesses to the child’s death assembled at the tavern,
where the jury and Yoder questioned them. Though the questions varied, each person
testifying was asked, as it was put to one individual, to “state all you know about the life
and death of the child.” In addition, Yoder requested each witness describe the infant’s
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“color.” All of them testified that the infant was black. Indeed, Jamima Lynn, Julianna’s
mother, claimed she avoided handling the dead child because of its color. Concerned
about the “talk” circulating within the community about the identity of the infant’s father,
Jamima worried that touching the corpse might implicate her in its death.
By the 1870s, repeated references to the “color” of the dead infant were not unusual in
inquests of this type, especially in the South. Yet this line of questioning marked a
significant departure from local legal processes in antebellum America, where a dead
infant’s race was usually noted as a passing aside in an individual’s testimony. Drawing
on instances of infanticide from North Carolina, this paper explores how Americans in
the post-Civil War South used legal processes to construct and reinforce particular beliefs
about the significance of racial difference. In doing so, local communities shaped the
processes through which modern ideas about race became embedded in both state and
federal institutions of law and government in postbellum America.
Biographies of Participants:
Carolyn Ramsey
Carolyn Ramsey joined the faculty of Colorado University Law School in 2001. She
teaches courses in criminal law, criminal procedure, gender issues, and legal history. She
graduated from Stanford Law School with distinction in 1998 and served as a law clerk
for Chief Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court for the Northern
District of California and Judge Paul J. Kelly, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals
for the Tenth Circuit. In addition to her law degree, Professor Ramsey received graduate
training as a social historian at Stanford University. This background stimulates her
interest in the way the law is used either to enforce or to create cultural norms. She is
widely published on historical and modern aspects of criminal law, criminal procedure,
and gender issues. In 2007, her article, Intimate Homicide: Gender and Crime Control,
1880-1920, won the Jules Milstein Faculty Scholarship Award at the University of
Colorado Law School. In addition to her recent work on public responses to intimatepartner violence, Professor Ramsey researches the legal history of police investigations.
Contact Information:
401 UCB, University of Colorado Law School
Boulder, CO 80309 USA
Office Phone: (303) 735–5028
** Appeared as presenter at 2009 ASLH meeting.
Elizabeth Parish Smith
Elizabeth Parish Smith is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Under the direction of Jacquelyn Hall, she is writing her dissertation “River
Queens: Disorderly Women and Reconstruction Politics in Memphis and New Orleans,
1865-77.” She received an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from the UNC
Graduate School to spend Fall 2008 in New Orleans. She worked in Memphis in summer
2007 with the support of a Mowry Dissertation Fellowship and a Center for the Study of
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