"It must be remembered that Assaline Hearne is an ignorant freedwoman and from her status in society is deprived of that physical protection which others possess."

   -- Harvey D. Prendergast, Attorney for Azeline Hearne, to  Charles E. Morse, undated and marked “Exhibit B," Microfilm Reel #39, Correspondence of the Office of Civil Affairs, District of Texas, RG 393, National Archives.

When Azeline Hearne’s name appears in surviving letters, documents, and files, it is usually spelled “Assaline” or “Asaline” or less frequently “Azalene,” and incorrectly most often as “Adaline.”  Because she most likely was born into slavery in a French-speaking area of Louisiana, the various spellings of her slave name are corruptions of the uncommon name “Azéline,” a surname that by the turn of the twenty-first century still remained on France’s official list of legally acceptable feminine prénoms.   While the accent would have normally been placed on the second syllable, the recurrent appearance of her name written as “Assaline” indicates that Anglo-Texans mimicked the pronunciations of former slaves who placed the accent on the first syllable.  Her name was not limited exclusively to black women.  The name “Azeline” or “Asaline” was frequently used as a middle name of Southern white women in the nineteenth century.[1] 

Except for a glimpse into her legal battles and difficulties immediately after her emancipation from slavery, most of Azeline’s story is unknown.  The antebellum “Slave Schedules” of the federal manuscript censuses do not contain her name, or for that matter the name of any slave.  Nor can she be located in any census taken after the Civil War.  However, the federal census enumerators who visited the Hearne family plantations in Louisiana and Texas in 1850 and 1860, respectively, listed what, by a process of elimination, had to have been her respective ages, making calculation of her year of birth possible.  Enough other pieces of information can be recovered from obscurity to construct an outline of her story -- a narrative that neither she nor the major players in her legal disputes could ever have assembled by themselves.[2]

Azeline survived forty years as an enslaved woman only to become in her old age a reclusive, sickly, and impoverished woman wandering from place to place in the Brazos River “bottomlands” in Robertson County, Texas.  Although she was never acknowledged by society to have in any way influenced the course of historical events, her life reveals as much, if not more, about the period of Reconstruction after the American Civil War than the lives of many who attained distinction through their fame, wealth, or extraordinary achievements.  Even though freedom’s first generation of African Americans benefited far more than has often been recognized after the United States Congress took control of the course of Reconstruction, what happened to Azeline demonstrates the limits to what could have been achieved in the way of securing legal equality and simple justice for the former slaves throughout the ex-Confederate South in the post-Civil War period.

During slavery Azeline had cohabitated with her unmarried and wealthy master, Samuel (“Sam”) R. Hearne.  She bore him four children, only one of whom survived early childhood.  When Sam Hearne died in late 1866, he publicly acknowledged, to the dismay of his brothers and cousins, his years of miscegenation by bequeathing his entire estate to his twenty-year-old mulatto son with a provision that he take care of his mother, Azeline.  When her son died in early 1868, she, as her son’s sole legatee, became the owner of Sam’s estate, which included one of the most profitable cotton plantations in East Texas -- a circumstance making her briefly one of the wealthiest former slaves in the South.  As a consequence, during the late 1860s to the early 1880s, she became a familiar figure at the Robertson County District Court where she was sued numerous times by dozens of litigants, including on one occasion by her own lawyer.  Facing throughout the period the vulnerabilities of a southern black woman in an unashamedly white racist patriarchal society, Azeline was an obvious target for predatory whites.   Her experience with the law, lawyers, and the courts occurred in an environment of volatile postwar and worsening post-Reconstruction race relations in which the large majority of whites determinedly sought to dilute and demolish black civil rights, including not only voting rights but also – and just as importantly – basic property rights.

Azeline was the first freedwoman to be a party to three separate civil lawsuits appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, and the first former slave in Robertson County indicted on criminal charges of perjury.  Her life intersected the careers of a host of both notable and notorious people.  She was briefly the landlord of ex-slave Israel S. Campbell, later memorialized as the “Father of Negro Baptists in Texas” because he was the first to ordain black Baptist preachers.  The bevy of attorneys who represented her, sued her, and took advantage of her included William Pitt Ballinger, a prominent Galveston lawyer who twice declined appointments to the Texas Supreme Court; William H. Hamman, the state’s first oil prospector who accepted on two successive occasions the gubernatorial nomination of the Greenback Party; and Harvey D. Prendergast, a prominent corporate lawyer and special judge in Robertson and Travis Counties in the 1870s and 1880s.  For a brief period after the war, antisecessionist and ex-slaveholder Benjamin (“Ben”) Brown guaranteed her physical protection from attacks by white terrorist groups and the Ku Klux Klan.  Brown, who briefly served as a Freedmen’s Bureau agent for the federal government, was one of the most infamous gang leaders in the annals of east central Texas criminal history. 

The manner in which agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Republican officeholders, local attorneys, and wealthy white members of the extended Hearne and Lewis families dealt with Azeline largely determined the nature of her legal problems.  The motives of these and other individuals with whom she interacted are difficult at times to evaluate due to gaps in the available historical record as well as the unreliability of secondary historical accounts based on local Reconstruction folklore about “Negro supremacy” and “carpetbagger misrule.”  Therefore, much of her story must be couched in the language of conjecture and probability.  Speculation, however, about why the major performers in her story acted as they did is grounded in the most recent scholarship on the Reconstruction era in Texas and placed in the context of the larger history of Robertson County where most of the drama of her life unfolded.[3]

Too little is known about Azeline prior to her master’s death to reveal the nature of her personal life under slavery.  Nor does her story cast additional light on any of the major antebellum political events caused by recurrent disagreements over slavery between the Northern and Southern states.  Yet the first half of her life as an enslaved woman illustrates how a system of permanent racial and chattel slavery put people, both white and black, in circumstances that compelled them to grapple with deep-seated moral predicaments.  As a light-skinned slave, described as “a yellow woman, almost white,” who cohabitated with her master, she embodied one of the major ethical dilemmas that a Southern slaveholding society was continuously forced to confront.  Her master’s fornication and miscegenation were potentially destructive to slave discipline and, if recklessly flaunted, were condemned as scandalous by white society.  Even if one assumes that Azeline was thankful for her owner’s special treatment toward her, the precarious position of being her master’s concubine conflicted with all major principles of basic morality.[4] 

Azeline’s story reveals a great deal about the revolutionary and tumultuous period of readjustment immediately following the Civil War.  No other period of Texas history has been as mythologized as Reconstruction.  About a fifth of the adult white male population of Robertson County died fighting for the Confederate cause, and a couple hundred more were maimed or injured.  Not only a cult of mourning arose, but also the myth of a “Lost Cause” soon developed in response to the profound disruptions faced by white society in the postwar era.  More importantly, after years of regarding slavery as a natural and beneficial labor system and believing that the descendants of black Africans were an inherently inferior species, the large majority of whites refused to agree to changes that mandated, at least in theory, equal justice for the former slaves, including Azeline and her offspring.  Most white Anglo Texans believed that an elevation of blacks to full civic and civil equality would necessitate a transformation of their basic nature.  Pervasive racism provided a powerful obstacle to the willingness of whites to view the legal rights of former slaves as matters guaranteed by law. 

Although the experience of Reconstruction at the grass-roots level in Texas varied greatly from one county to the next, Robertson County was in many ways typical of other counties containing large concentrations of ex-slaves.  Black and white populations were of roughly equal proportions, and black voters, who made up the overwhelming majority of the Republican constituency, remained a force to be reckoned with in local politics until the late 1890s.  From 1876 to 1900, Robertson County was in the Republican column in the balloting for presidential electors.  The freedpeople, including Azeline, were unquestionably actors in shaping their own fate, and neither they nor their white political allies, Yankee carpetbaggers and local scalawags, were all ignorant, corrupt, or opportunistic as older racist accounts characterized them.  Most Republican leaders both white and black were courageous men who formed the cutting edge of a revolutionary effort to build a truly biracial democracy on the ashes of slavery.  All in all, the achievements of Reconstruction were rather remarkable, and even though most were eventually undone, they at least created a memory of another, more favorable time when blacks briefly received at least a semblance of fair treatment.  More importantly, the accomplishments of the Republican governments, not just in Robertson County but throughout the South, set the agenda a century later during the civil rights movement of the 1960s for attaining a more equalitarian vision for America’s future.[5]    

Azeline’s story, nevertheless, lays bare many depressing details of post-Civil War interrelationships of race, gender, and power.  Because it is impossible to sever her story from an assessment of the white men who wielded the vast majority of economic and social power in Robertson County after the war, the turbulent political world of Reconstruction at the local level is explored here in detail.  Although Azeline admittedly never controlled events as much as events controlled her, and often found herself exhausted, ill-advised, and depressed, many of her actions were reasonable given the limited choices available to her.  At times her decisions proved quite savvy.  At one point she seemed tantalizingly close to achieving a modicum of revenge against those who had defrauded her for years.  She also came close to setting a precedent in the virtually underdeveloped Texas case law dealing with attorney malpractice and misconduct.  But as an ex-slave, as a woman, and as one having no training to prepare her to make the transition from slave concubine to courtroom protagonist, the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against her. 

The betrayal of Azeline by many individuals, especially those who in hindsight one would have expected to help her the most, thwarted her attempts to receive impartial treatment as one of freedom’s first generation of African Texans.  Although blacks played a central role in the unprecedented postwar adjustments that radically changed the world that the slaveholders had made, it was influential whites who dominated her life after slavery with their fraud, greed, and ineptitude.  Their manipulation of a judicial system insensitive to providing justice to those denied it under the application of the common law, not to mention the lack of any meaningful oversight of the professional obligations of attorneys or executors to their clients or trustees precluded any chance she had of receiving something other than counterfeit justice.  Even admitting, in the words of one former Texas slave, that emancipation “in poverty and trials and tribulations,” and “even amidst the most cruel prejudices,” was “sweeter than the best fed or the best clothed slavery in the world,” it would not change the fact that Azeline survived years of enslavement only to be overwhelmed by the burdens of freedom.[6]

What follows is an attempt to bring back to life the heretofore untold story of how calculating and devious attorneys and the wealthy collateral kin of Azeline’s former master cheated her out of her considerable lawful inheritance.  The sequence of events begins in the early 1850s when her master, Sam Hearne, brought her with him from Caddo Parrish, Louisiana, to the banks of the Brazos River in the rich alluvial bottomlands of Robertson County, Texas.