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 involved.  An example occurred in the case of Rhame vs.  Ferguson and Dangerfield, decided by the South Carolina Court of Appeals in 1839 in connection with a statute enacted by the legislature of that state in 1800 restricting manumissions and prescribing that any slaves illegally set free might be seized by any person as derelicts.  George Broad of St. John’s Parish, Berkeley County, had died without blood relatives in 1836, bequeathing fourteen slaves and their progeny to his neighbor Dangerfield “in trust nevertheless and for this purpose only that the said John R. Dangerfield, his executors and assigns do permit and suffer the said slaves ... to apply and appropriate their time and labor to their own proper use and behoof, without the intermeddling or interference of any person or persons