The Pre-Civil War Documents And Their Significance
One of the specific applications of Bessie Blount’s forensic expertise that appears in multiple accounts is her examination of pre-Civil War slave papers and documents.
These documents — the records of slave sales, freedom papers, bills of sale, wills that included enslaved people as property — are historical materials of significant importance. They document specific aspects of the institution of slavery in ways that other records do not. They name individuals who were enslaved. They record the specific legal mechanisms by which human beings were bought, sold, and owned.
As historical documents, they are also subject to forgery, misdating, and misrepresentation. People seeking to establish historical connections, to document family histories, or to create false provenance for artifacts have motivations to produce forged historical documents. The expertise of forensic document examiners in assessing paper aging, ink composition, printing techniques, and handwriting characteristics is directly applicable to authenticating these materials.
Blount’s work with slave papers represents an intersection between her forensic expertise and the specific historical materials most relevant to African American history. For a Black woman working as a forensic document examiner in the 1970s and 1980s, examining the papers that documented the legal mechanisms of slavery was both professional work and personal history.
The accounts do not specify the particular cases or organizations for which she did this work, but the fact that she did it — and that she brought her forensic expertise to bear on documents that are central to Black American historical experience — is a specific and important dimension of her forensic career.