Abstract
Excerpted From: Russell Fowler, Slavery and the Tennessee Supreme Court, 62 Tennessee Bar Journal 28 (May/June 2026) (51 Footnotes) (Full Document)
Slavery arrived in Tennessee with the earliest settlers. The enslaved were not only required to work without compensation, but they were also dispossessed of their right to marry and keep their children. Slavery took little hold on the small family farms of mountainous East Tennessee yet swelled on the large cotton plantations of Middle and West Tennessee, becoming “an important social and economic institution.” By 1860, 25% of the state’s population was Black, and 40% of that number was in West Tennessee. In 1826, the interstate slave trade was prohibited in the state, but the ban was ignored and formally repealed in 1855.
With growing fear of “slave rebellions,” gatherings of abolitionists and Black people -- free and unfree -- were forbidden, and legally sanctioned citizen patrols enforced the “slave code,” captured “runaways” and terrorized. Tennessee courts were authorized to punish “conspiracy to rebel” “as they saw fit.” In 1831, a law was enacted requiring the emancipated to leave the state, and in 1854, deportation to Africa mandated. And the General Assembly, “tightening the screws on the slave population,” continually contrived to make it more difficult to legally obtain freedom.
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In contrast to the later and infamous U.S. Supreme Court 1856 Dred Scott decision denying standing, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney said a Black person “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld standing as the only means to fulfill testamentary intent. Green wrote, to hold otherwise “would shock humanity, and be an indelible stigma on our jurisprudence.” And with words resounding across the centuries, Judge Green concluded:
A slave is not in the condition of a horse or an ox. His liberty is restrained, it is true. ... But he is made after the image of the Creator. He has mental capacities, and an immortal principle in his nature, that constitute him equal to his owner but for the accidental position in which fortune has placed him. ... [T]he laws under which he is held as a slave have not and cannot extinguish his high-born nature nor deprive him of his many rights which are inherent in man.
Yes, the joint tenure of judges Turley, Reese and Green was the golden era of Tennessee jurisprudence, evidencing great wisdom, courage and justice. They bought true meaning to the Supreme Court’s motto: FIAT JUSTITIA RUAT CAELUM “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”
RUSSELL FOWLER is director of litigation and advocacy at Legal Aid of East Tennessee (LAET), and since 1999 he has been adjunct professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
