Taking former masters to court: civil cases between former masters and slaves in the US south, 1865-1899

This essay analyses the trial records of civil cases between former slaves and their former slaveholders between 1865 and 1899 to consider the different, often competing, ways in which these parties portrayed the antebellum and postbellum worlds. In courtrooms around the post-war South, former slaves and former masters wove diverging narratives about slavery, capitalism and labor, family and authority, and sexual violence. Litigants sought to leverage these tales and their interlinked histories to win legal disputes against each other, while also working to advance their own visions of the post-war world