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for killing a freedman, or fail to hang a negro who had killed a white man in self-defence.” The need to demonstrate to the satisfaction of a white jury that the defendant had been “animated by the intention to kill” complicated the conviction and punishment of any white person for murder, as did the underlying principle of slave law that a master’s severe chastisement of his blacks did not justify resistance. As the Georgia Supreme Court had once ruled, even if the owner should “exceed the bounds of reason … in his chastisement, the slave must submit … unless the attack … be calculated to produce death.”137

Rather than press for a diminution or increase in the penalties assessed by the courts, blacks simply insisted that the punishment fit the crime and be applied equally to both races. In New Orleans, the local criminal court sentenced a white person convicted of theft (a pair of shoes valued at $13) to one day in prison; the same court on the same day committed a black person found guilty of theft (shirts and petticoats valued at $18) to three months in prison—or, as the local black newspaper noted, “three days for the stealing, and eighty-seven days for being colored.” The disparity in punishments, however, was not confined to the regular courts; in many regions, the provost marshals adopted the same double standard. In Salisbury, North Carolina, a white woman killed a black mother who had tried to rescue her child from a severe beating; a military court found her guilty of manslaughter and fined her $1,000, and within several days the white community had collected and paid the fine. In Natchez, a white man who brutally assaulted an elderly black woman was fined $15 ($5 for the provost marshal who sentenced him and $10 for the injured woman); the victim contributed her award to the Lincoln Monument Fund, exclaiming, “I don’t want money, but justice.”138

When blacks drew up their postwar demands, equal justice almost invariably superseded all others. Even those who argued the primacy of the suffrage or economic grievances conceded that without equal protection under the law, neither the property they accumulated, the wages they were promised, nor the vote they might someday cast would be safe. “To be sure, sah, we wants to vote,” a black barber observed, “but, sah, de great matter is to git into de witness-box.” The price exacted of the white South in exchange for the reinstatement of civil courts was the admissibility of black testimony. Like emancipation and later the suffrage, whites viewed it as a consequence of military defeat and occupation. But that hardly made it a popular concept. “Nothing would make me cut a nigger’s throat from ear to ear so quick,” said a white shoemaker in Liberty, Virginia, “as having him set up his impudent face to tell that a thing wasn’t so when I said it was so.”139

With the right of testimony, blacks had hoped to secure the equal protection which the Constitution ensured all citizens. The credibility accorded such testimony by white judges and juries, however, made this substantially less than the triumph freedmen had imagined. “Why, no nigger can be believed whether he is under oath or not,” a Virginian observed. “No one that knows a nigger will ever think of believing him if it’s for his interest to lie.” Making essentially the same point, a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina, perhaps said more than he intended when he argued that white people were simply not ready to admit black testimony against other whites. “What would be the good of putting niggers in the witness-box?” he asked. “You must have niggers in the jury-box, too, or nigger evidence will not be believed. I don’t think you could find twelve men in the whole State who would attach any weight to the testimony of ninety-nine niggers in a hundred.”140

Few blacks might have disagreed with that assessment of the minimal impact of their testimony. Unless they were admitted to the juries, too, they realized, equal justice would remain a mockery. “It is the right of every man accused of any offence, to be tried by a jury