Counterfeit Justice

The Judicial Odyssey of Texas Freedwoman Azeline Hearne

Dale Baum

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807148433
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Esclavitud

For many of the forty years of her life as a slave, Azeline Hearne cohabitated with her wealthy, unmarried master, Samuel R. Hearne. She bore him four children, only one of whom survived past early childhood. When Sam died shortly after the Civil War ended, he publicly acknowledged his relationship with Azeline and bequeathed his entire estate to their twenty-year-old mulatto son, with the provision that he take care of his mother. When their son died early in 1868, Azeline inherited one of the most profitable cotton plantations in Texas and became one of the wealthiest ex-slaves in the former Confederacy. In Counterfeit Justice, Dale Baum traces Azeline's remarkable story, detailing her ongoing legal battles to claim and maintain her legacy.
As Baum shows, Azeline's inheritance quickly made her a target for predatory whites determined to strip her of her land. A familiar figure at the Robertson County District Court from the late 1860s to the early 1880s, Azeline faced numerous lawsuits -- including one filed against her by her own lawyer. Samuel Hearne's family took steps to dispossess her, and other unscrupulous white men challenged the title to her plantation, using claims based on old Spanish land grants. Azeline's prolonged and courageous defense of her rightful title brought her a certain notoriety: the first freedwoman to be a party to three separate civil lawsuits appealed all the way to the Texas Supreme Court and the first former slave in Robertson County indicted on criminal charges of perjury. Although repeatedly blocked and frustrated by the convolutions of the legal system, she evolved from a bewildered defendant to a determined plaintiff who, in one extraordinary lawsuit, came tantalizingly close to achieving revenge against those who defrauded her for over a decade.
Due to gaps in the available historical record and the unreliability of secondary accounts based on local Reconstruction folklore, many of the details of Azeline's story are lost to history. But Baum grounds his speculation about her life in recent scholarship on the Reconstruction era, and he puts his findings in context in the history of Robertson County. Although history has not credited Azeline Hearne with influencing the course of the law, the story of her uniquely difficult position after the Civil War gives an unprecedented view of the era and of one solitary woman's attempt to negotiate its social and legal complexities in her struggle to find justice.
Baum's meticulously researched narrative will be of keen interest to legal scholars and to all those interested in the plight of freed slaves during this era.

Chapter 1

No Place for a White Man to Live

There is quite a large portion of the county bottom land, and on the Brazos [River] those lands are in width from three to five miles, and in quality, I presume, to any in the world.

—WILLIAM H. HAMMAN, QUOTED IN SMITH, “THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WILLIAM HARRISON HAMMAN”

THE HISTORY OF THE Brazos River is deeply entwined with the story of Anglo American settlement in Texas. Eighteenth-century Spanish explorers christened it “el Rio de los Brazos de Dios,” or “the Arms of God.” Originating in the West Texas rolling plains and flowing over eight hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico, its meanderings through its lower stretch define the western boundary of Robertson County, separating it from Milam and Burleson Counties. Here, the much smaller but equally muddy and silt-tinged Little Brazos River runs parallel three to five miles to the east of the Big Brazos. Between these two rivers lies the richest farmland in Robertson County, if not the entire state, known as the “Brazos Bottoms.” From time immemorial to the present day, floods have deposited in the bottomlands topsoil originally carried away by erosion of the dark black earth from miles upstream.¹

In 1850 the population of Robertson County numbered only 934, of whom nearly 30 percent were slaves. During the remainder of the decade, with the arrival of many new settlers desiring to grow cotton in the fertile bottomlands, the county’s population grew more than fivefold, climbing by 1860 to 4,997, of whom nearly half were slaves. Although some cotton had been planted as early as 1840, livestock raising and subsistence agriculture had remained predominant until the early 1850s. Between 1850 and 1860 the number of cotton bales produced increased fifteenfold, and Robertson County became typical of the other counties in the central Brazos River Valley of East Texas, where white men of every political party affiliation were interested in land, cotton, and slaves. Under the leadership of such men, Robertson County gravitated toward the political catastrophe of secession and resulting civil war.²

ARRIVAL OF THE LEGENDARY PIONEERING
HEARNE AND LEWIS FAMILIES

Sometime during the summer or fall of 1853, Sam Hearne, a thirty-seven-year-old Georgia-born slaveholder, left his plantation near Shreveport in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, and moved to Robertson County. Just two years earlier he had purchased a large tract of unimproved land in the Brazos River bottomlands—a place considered “no place for a white man to live” because of its abundance of poisonous snakes, poor drainage, and reputation for outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera. Here, Sam made his home for the rest of his life. In many ways, he was representative of the thousands of planters from the older states of the lower South who migrated in the 1850s into Texas to grow cotton with slave labor. However, beginning with his first documented appearance at the county seat in 1851, Sam was something other than what he seemed.³

A lifelong bachelor, Sam died in the fall of 1866. His decision to bequeath his entire estate to his illicit mulatto son outraged and embarrassed his brothers and cousins. At the turn of the century, Sam’s surviving female cousins—Rhoda Lee (Hearne) Cox, or “Aunt Rhoda,” who was known as “the cyclopædia of the family,” and Adeline Missouri (Hearne) Lewis, the widow of Charles Lewis—figuratively took a hatchet to the Hearne family tree and removed Sam’s name from the genealogical record. While genealogists commonly list the names of family members who committed terrible transgressions with no additional information beyond their birth and death dates, no such consideration was extended to Sam. His cohabitation with his son’s mother during slavery, and the problems it caused his wealthy relatives for decades after his death, apparently rivaled murder and treason.⁴

Sam was a member of the pioneering Hearnes, for whom cotton growing was an extended family enterprise. From their previous home sites on adjoining farms not far from the Texas state line in Caddo Parish, most of the family clan arrived in Robertson County in 1852. Under the leadership of Sam’s older brother, Christopher Columbus, or “Lum” as he was commonly called, they came with their ox wagons loaded with household goods, farm tools, rifles with ammunition, and lockboxes containing money and valuables, along with the supplies necessary for establishing a general merchandise store. Eighty to one hundred slaves walked the entire two-hundred-mile trip in front of the wagons while herding numerous mules, cattle, oxen, pigs, and horses ahead of them. Because the bottom-lands were thickly covered with cedars, cottonwoods, winged elms, hack-berries, pecans, and hickory trees, the Hearnes probably carried as many as three axes for each male slave.⁵

The route they took from northwestern Louisiana into Texas led them across the Sabine River into Panola County, and then on to the old Spanish colonial town of Nacogdoches. From there they turned westward on the San Antonio Road, or the legendary El Camino Real, over which “history stalked into Texas.” They passed through the heart of the East Texas “Piney Woods” region when traveling through Cherokee and Houston Counties, then forded the Trinity River and traveled along the boundary lines between Madison and Leon Counties and finally between Brazos and Robertson Counties. Their destination was the small but well-known town of Wheelock, the county seat of Robertson County and a major stagecoach stop on the post oak grasslands, or high prairie, on the “Houston & Waco Road.”⁶

Sam had previously scouted the area, along with his cousin, Horatio (“Rasche”) Reardon Hearne, and Rasche’s brother-in-law Charles Lewis. They were the first three members of the extended Hearne family to buy tracts of land in the southern part of the Brazos Bottoms, where, because of conflicting claims of ownership, clearing land for growing cotton lagged far behind the northern part. Pending lawsuits over land titles caused Sam, Rasche, and Charles to protect their land purchases by contracts and bonds rather than by deeds. In case of successful challenges to their titles, they thus stood to avoid paying a large part of the original purchase price and receive compensation for losses sustained in having made improvements on another person’s land. Subsequent purchases of land by the Hearnes and Lewises often followed similar legally intricate patterns of acquisition. Sam’s brother Lum, who had also made prior trips into the area to purchase land in the Bottoms, bought “a beautiful site” in Wheelock for his homestead that served as an initial base of operations for those who arrived with him in 1852. With their overseers and slaves, the Hearnes began clearing their Brazos Bottom lands sixteen miles to the west in the southwestern part of the county.⁷

All the Hearnes were related by blood or marriage. Cousins had married cousins, brothers had married sisters from another family (Armstrong), and sisters had likewise married brothers from other families (Lewis and Powell). Keeping the main family lines straight was a challenging undertaking. Sam’s side of the family was originally from Alabama by way of Georgia. His mother’s maiden name was Elizabeth Ransom, and therefore he and his brothers and sisters were known as the “Ransom Hearnes.” The other side of the family clan was known as the “Miles Hearnes.” Before marrying Sam’s uncle, Nancy Miles had “inherited quite a fortune” and had a distinguished pedigree traceable to Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene.⁸

The Hearnes believed in big families; like most planters they counted children as material assets. But why they ran the risk of inbreeding is a mystery. Even the slaves, the human chattels that the Hearnes owned, considered a marriage between first cousins to be taboo. Yet without fear of endogamy, Sam’s sister, Priscilla Hearne, had married her cousin Rasche, and Sam’s brother George Washington (“Wash”) Hearne, had married his cousin Frances Calloway Hearne. To complicate matters, not only did Rasche and Priscilla and Wash and Frances, share a common set of grandparents, but their grandparents were also first cousins. Such circumstances increased, albeit slightly, the statistical chances of Sam’s nephews and nieces, in this case the children of his brother Wash and his sister Priscilla, being born with recessive genes—a biological calamity that could not possibly have gone unnoticed. Nevertheless, “the marriage of cousins,” according to one contemporary observer of southern slaveholders, was “almost the rule rather than the exception.”⁹

No evidence suggests that slaveholders believed they had the right to demand the marriage of their father’s brother’s daughters to safeguard their bloodlines from becoming polluted or moribund. To the contrary, their endogamous preferences were primarily a way to create or preserve wealth, power, and status. Endogamy cemented ties of cooperation and loyalty and consolidated land and property within a generational age group. The success that the Louisiana generation of Hearnes and Lewises subsequently achieved in antebellum Robertson County was largely due to their management of their plantations, slave labor forces, and mercantile stores as one large family business.¹⁰

Not all the Ransom Hearnes and Miles Hearnes migrated to Texas. And not all those who settled in Robertson County during the antebellum period arrived in Wheelock in 1852. Known to be among the large group that camped on Lum’s Wheelock property in 1852 were Rasche and Priscilla, along with Sam’s brother Alfred L. Hearne, or “Alley,” who came with his wife Charlotte (Armstrong) Hearne. Apparently Alley’s twin brother, Selby W. Hearne, died on the way into Texas or in Wheelock soon after his arrival, because in early 1853 his wife, Nancy K. (Armstrong) Hearne, was appointed the guardian of his estate and of their three minor children. Accompanying Charlotte and Nancy were their younger sisters and their widowed mother, Harriett Armstrong. Sam’s cousin Adeline came with her Connecticut-born husband, Charles, and their three children, of whom the oldest was a six-year-old son named Henry Lee.¹¹

Subsequently, in 1854 Sam’s cousin Ebenezer (“Ebb”) Hearne arrived with his wife Minerva and their sons William and Lorenzo. And in 1859, Sam’s youngest brother Wash arrived with his wife Frances. If the sworn testimony of Rasche, Sam’s cousin and brother-in-law, is reliable, then Sam himself did not make the 1852 trip but permanently returned to Robertson County some time during the following year. Circumstantial reasons support Rasche’s claims that Sam arrived afterward and took immediate possession of the 903 acres of land that he had purchased two years earlier in the Brazos Bottoms.¹²

Sam’s mother died in 1853 in Louisiana, and perhaps he stayed behind long enough to be with her during a prolonged illness that caused her death. As a bachelor living adjacent to his married siblings, he had most likely lived with his mother since his father’s death in 1844. In 1850 the census enumerator for Caddo Parish recorded Sam as a “planter” at the head of a household consisting of only three individuals: his widowed “mother”; a slave “overseer”; and an eighty-two-year-old man with no occupation or relationship listed. Sam was not among the group of his kin-folks who appeared together in 1853 at the Robertson County courthouse to pay their county and state taxes, but the following year the tax assessor listed him among them on the tax rolls. Sam and his brothers had often purchased land in Louisiana in joint ownership, and Rasche and Charles Lewis bought the first family land in Robertson County as common owners. But Sam’s acquisition of land in his own name suggests his determination from the start to live in relative social isolation on the land that he had purchased on the banks of the Brazos River.¹³

The bulk of the slaves that Sam owned in 1850 most likely made the 1852 trip. Whether some of them stayed behind in Louisiana with him cannot be known. But what is known is that in 1853 Azeline, a twenty-eight-year-old, light-skinned female with an unusual French name, and Doctor (“Dock”) Samuel Jones Hearne, her seven-year-old son with an equally curious name, were with Sam when he arrived in Robertson County, and that they and Sam did not initially live in Wheelock. After a brief stay on the Samuel R. Moss farm, on Spring Creek close to the edge of the Brazos Bottoms, Sam completed building his log cabin manor house on the southeastern corner of his land. Here, on his Brazos River plantation, Sam lived for the remainder of his life with Azeline and Dock.¹⁴

Azeline had caught Sam’s eye sometime during the 1840s. She was twenty-one years old in 1846, when Dock was born. She had at least one sister, about whom virtually nothing is known except she, as most likely the slave of either Sam or his extended family, also made the trip to Robertson County. On some level Sam had to have realized that unless he sold Azeline and her young son to a buyer who would take them away, it would be impossible to hide his paternity of her child. Moreover, Dock had one brother and two sisters, who presumably had died at childbirth, because in the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules they are neither identified as mulattoes nor matched by their ages. Sam’s extended family and the entire slave community in the southern half of the Brazos Bottoms undoubtedly knew that Sam was the father of Azeline’s children. Most of the slaves on the nearby plantations of his brothers and his cousins had resided in Caddo Parish when Dock was born. Sam’s “consanguineous amalgamation,” or “miscegenation”—a pejorative word not yet in the American vocabulary—was common knowledge.¹⁵

Direct evidence of how Sam and Azeline’s white neighbors in the Brazos Bottoms viewed their cross-racial relationship does not exist, although in a sworn deposition taken in 1860 to establish Sam’s continual residence on his 903 acres after he arrived in Robertson County, wealthy landowner Jesse Mumford, who operated a ferry on the Brazos River to the south of Sam’s plantation, made a reference to “Samuel and his wife”—a rather generous concession to Sam’s slave concubine. But Jesse, like Sam, was something of a sexual renegade himself, having been indicted in 1838 for adultery, and at the time he signed his affidavit he was cohabiting, while still unmarried, with another woman half his age. Far more revealing is the level of disdain for Sam on the part of Robertson County public officials, as gauged by a perusal of the courthouse records, which yield a glimpse of the Hearne and Lewis families’ activities during the antebellum and Civil War years.¹⁶

The court of county commissioners summoned Lum and his cousin Rasche for jury duty in 1853, and it appointed them, along with Alley, Nancy, and her mother Harriett, to employ their slaves as workers on county roads. The following year it appointed Rasche to the county’s slave patrol for the precinct that included most of the family’s plantation lands. Lum, Rasche, Alley, and Charles Lewis also served as slave patrollers, road overseers, and jurors throughout the remainder of the 1850s and during the war years. After Sam’s cousin Ebb and brother Wash arrived, they also served on a regular basis in these capacities. A few minor lapses in the family’s otherwise excellent record of civic service occurred when Lum pleaded guilty for refusing to accept a certain appointment as a public road supervisor, and during the war when he failed to appear as a witness in a criminal case. During the last years of the war, Ebb paid a fine for his failure to appear as a member of a grand jury, and Rasche, Wash, and Alley were each fined for being defaulting jurors. However, the most baffling contradiction regarding the Hearne family’s public service was the absence of Sam’s name among the lists of men in Robertson County called for jury duty or appointed to the slave patrols.¹⁷

Because Sam owned a plantation acknowledged as one of the finest in the bottomlands, it beggars belief why he was never selected as a juror or patroller. Although the county commissioners required Sam to put his slaves to work every year on the public roads, such obligations were perfunctory and entailed few decisions or judgments on his part. When Sam filed a petition detailing plans for a new public road starting on his plantation at the Brazos River and then running east out of the bottom-lands to the Houston & Waco Road, the commissioners studiously failed to name him among those they selected in his neighborhood to write a report on the road’s feasibility. Although the probate records list Sam at the same frequency as his other family members as either a creditor or debtor for assorted amounts of money in the accounts of various deceased individuals, he never received a court appointment as an executor, appraiser, or partitioner of property or lands. Sam, in sharp contrast to others in his extended family, did not enjoy the confidence or respect of Robertson County’s public officials.¹⁸

Piecing together other bits of info...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in Notes
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: No Place for a White Man to Live
• Chapter 2: Thar Am No Parties on Marster’s Plantation
• Chapter 3: A Supposed or Pretended Will
• Chapter 4: Unheard of in Any System of Procedure
• Chapter 5: A Most Wanton Violation of Private Rights
• Chapter 6: It Seems Mighty Queer to Me, Lawyer
• Chapter 7: Endeavoring to Wrong, Cheat, and Defraud Her
• Chapter 8: The Old House Hasn’t Killed You Yet
• Chapter 9: Divested by the Courts
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Timeline of Major Legal Events
• Bibliography
• Index