Black Rage Confronts the Law. Paul Harris
implications of a black man so enraged at his condition that he would strike out against white people were not only terrifying, but threatened the entire social construct of blacks as a docile, weak, subservient race. So Seward did not talk about black rage; he probably did not even consider it. He did understand, however, that blacks lived under an unfair, oppressive system. He recognized that such a system had driven Freeman mad and was willing to put the system of racism on trial.
Seward’s two-day-long closing argument gives flavor and political context to the case. He showed no hesitation in putting forward the theme of racial injustice, arguing that if a white man or white woman had exhibited the signs of mental disease that Freeman exhibited, his or her case would have been dismissed.
Seward argued that prejudice infected the standards by which his client was judged. The symptoms of Freeman’s mental disorder were being misinterpreted simply as the normal behavior of an inferior race. He pleaded with the jury to look deeper than this stereotype and to treat Freeman as a man.
An inferior standard of intelligence has been set up here as the standard of the Negro race, and a false one as the standard of the Asiatic race. This Prisoner traces a divided lineage. On the paternal side his ancestry is lost among the tiger hunters on the Gold Coast of Africa, while his mother constitutes a portion of the small remnant of the Narragansett tribe. Hence it is held that the Prisoner’s intellect is to be compared with the depreciating standard of the African, and his passions with the violent and ferocious character erroneously imputed to the Aborigines. Indications of manifest derangement, or at least of imbecility, approaching to Idiocy, are, therefore set aside, on the ground that they harmonize with the legitimate but degraded characteristics of the races from which he is descended. You, gentlemen, have, or ought to have, lifted up your souls above the bondage of prejudices so narrow and so mean as these.
At this point, Seward pursued a strategy quite common in the nineteenth century: he brought religion into his argument. He reminded the jurors that all men, including black men, were created by God. He attempted to reach through their prejudice and feelings of superiority, to their shared Christian beliefs that all men are brothers.
The color of the Prisoner’s skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual, immortal mind which works beneath. In spite of human pride, he is still your brother, and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father, and yours and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race—the image of our Maker. Hold him then to be MAN. Exact of him all the responsibilities which should be exacted under like circumstances if he belonged to the Anglo-Saxon race, and make for him all the allowances which, under like circumstances, you would expect for yourselves.
Seward sought to demonstrate that Bill went insane by describing his life. Although he mentioned hereditary insanity as a predisposing cause, pointing out that Bill’s aunt died in a lunatic asylum and that his uncle was considered a lunatic, he focused primarily on the social conditions under which blacks suffered.
If neglect of education produces crimes, it equally produces Insanity. Here was a bright, cheerful, happy child, destined to become a member of the social state, entitled by the principles of our Government to equal advantages for perfecting himself in intelligence, and even in political rights, with each of the three millions of our citizens, and blessed by our religion with equal hopes.... [But] there was no school for him ... there has been no school here for children of his caste. A school for colored children was never established here, and all the common schools were closed against them.
Seward explained that when he tried to send colored children who worked for him to school with his own children, they were sent back to him with a message that black children could not go to the school.
He described how Bill was “subjected, in his tender years, to severe and undeserved oppression,” recounting how Bill was whipped by the family he worked for, beaten at another house because he forgot to return an umbrella, falsely convicted of stealing a horse, and at only sixteen years old sent to a state prison instead of a house of refuge. Seward railed against the prison, saying that “mere imprisonment is often a cause of insanity.” In Bill’s experience prison was a terrible nightmare, filled with beatings. The result was a descent into madness. Seward described it thus: “Such a life, so filled with neglect, injustice and severity, with anxiety, pain, disappointment, solicitude and grief, would have its fitting conclusion in a madhouse.”
An understanding of racial oppression was at the heart of Seward’s masterful closing arguments as he attempted to illustrate the consequences of Bill’s treatment at the hands of a prejudiced legal and penal system. One of the most powerful expressions of this injustice was articulated in John Depuy’s testimony, repeated by Seward in his closing argument: “They have made William Freeman what he is, a brute beast; they don’t make anything else of any of our people but brute beasts.”
In the cross-examination of the black witnessess, Hiram Depuy’s common-law wife, Deborah, was attacked for not being legally married, and Bill’s mother, Sally Freeman, was characterized by the prosecution as a drunk. Seward’s defense of these witnesses is interesting because it provides us with a window into the philosophical views of a racist nineteenth-century America and exposes the paternalism and notions of superiority of William Seward himself, one of the country’s leading white liberals.
Deborah De Puy is also assailed as unworthy of credit. She calls herself the wife of Hiram De Puy, with whom she has lived ostensibly in the relations of seven years, in, I believe, unquestioned fidelity to him and her children. But it appears that she has not been married with the proper legal solemnities. If she were a white woman, I should regard her testimony with caution, but the securities of marriage are denied to the African race over more than half this country. It is within our own memory that the master’s cupidity could divorce husband and wife within this State, and sell their children into perpetual bondage. Since the Act of Emancipation here, what has been done by the white man to lift up the race from the debasement into which he has plunged it? Let us impart to Negroes the knowledge and spirit of Christianity, and share with them the privileges, dignity and hopes of citizens and Christians, before we expect of them purity and self respect.
But, gentlemen, even in a slave State, the testimony of this witness would receive credit in such a cause, for Negroes may be witnesses there for and against persons of their own caste. It is only when the life, liberty or property of the white man is invaded, that the Negro is disqualified. Let us not be too severe. There was once upon the earth a Divine Teacher who shall come again to judge the work in righteousness. They brought to him a woman taken in adultery, and said to him that the law of Moses directed that such should be stoned to death, and he answered: “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.”
Seward’s defense of Sally Freeman shows his heartfelt compassion and his shame for what the white man did to Africans and Indians. Yet even here, the disease of superiority seeps through his oratory.
The testimony of Sally Freeman, the mother of the Prisoner, is questioned. She utters the voice of nature. She is the guardian whom God assigned to study, to watch, to learn, to know what the Prisoner was, and is, and to cherish the memory of it forever. She could not forget it if she would. There is not a blemish on the person of any one of us, born with us or coming from disease or accident, nor have we committed a right or wrong action, that has not been treasured up in the memory of a mother. Juror! roll up the sleeve from your manly arm, and you will find a scar there of which you know nothing. Your mother will give you the detail of every day’s progress of the preventive disease. Sally Freeman has the mingled blood of the African and Indian races. She is nevertheless a woman, and a mother, and nature bears witness in every climate and every country, to the singleness and uniformity of those characters. I have known and proved them in the hovel of the slave, and in the wigwam of the Chippewa. But Sally Freeman has been intemperate. The white man enslaved her ancestors of the one race, exiled and destroyed those of the other, and debased them all by corrupting their natural and healthful appetites. She comes honestly by her only vice. Yet when she comes here to testify for a life that is dearer to her than her own, to say she knows her own son, the white man says she is a drunkard! May Heaven forgive the white man for adding this last, this cruel injury to the wrongs of such a mother! Fortunately,