Petition for Habeas Corpus

After searching for a few hours on various library databases, I came across a petition for habeas corpus on www.archives.gov.  Edmund Kinney, a black freed slave living in Hanner County, Virginia, was requesting the court to look back over his arrest and imprisonment in 1878 after Kinney and his girlfriend Mary (a white woman) went to Washington, D.C. to get married.

As a refresher, habeas corpus allows a person under arrest to be brought back before a judge or court; the court must show lawful grounds for imprisonment. Throughout this 16-page document, Kinney had to make it an obvious point that he is, as a black man, an American citizen: “The petition of Edmund Kinney humbly sheweth that he is a citizen of the United States… a man of color, of the negro race…”  He insisted that he had been “unlawfully restrained” and that Kinney and his wife’s arrest and subsequent punishment (hard labor) was a “violation of the Constitution”: a phrase that he repeated numerous times during his plea to the court.

On page two, Kinney mentioned that his wife is white – but that she was also an American citizen.  Both Edmund and his wife Mary knew that interracial marriage was against Virginia law, which was why they left for Washington, D.C. to be “united in the bonds of matrimony.”  He also made the point that they were both of lawful age to be wed, and that they had gone through the proper paperwork, and that the only reason they had been arrested and convicted was on racial grounds… which he believed was illegal.  Kinney insisted that if his marriage was valid in D.C., this should transcend any state lines and become valid in other areas of the United States, as well.  Eventually, they were awarded a rehearing of their case, so their petition for habeas corpus was granted.

I thought that this source was incredibly interesting.  It showed that although slaves had been freed in 1863, some fifteen years later they were still having to vehemently fight for their rights, and had to constantly show that they were indeed citizens of the United States (which Kinney mentioned numerous times during his petition) and should thus be awarded their basic rights.  Another interesting aspect of this source was how the legality of interracial marriage varied from state-to-state, much like gay marriage in today’s society.  It raised a lot of questions then (the primary one being, of course, whether or not other states had to recognize other states’ marriages), and it raises those same questions today.  It’s fascinating to see how documents from a vastly different time period can still have similarities to issues we are having in modern society.