The conditional framing in Rockwell’s instruction — “if sober, well-behaved, and free from disease” — was language of its time, and it carried embedded assumptions about whose respectability needed to be qualified and whose was presumed. It was not a statement of unconditional equal rights; it was a statement that people who met a certain standard of conduct could not be excluded on the basis of race. Those are related but distinct propositions, and the distinction mattered.
What Rockwell’s instruction gave the jury was legal permission to decide in Elizabeth Jennings’s favor. It told them that the law, as he understood and applied it, supported her claim. The jury did not have to fight the judge to rule for her.
They deliberated and awarded her $225 in damages.
The court added ten percent to that sum, plus $22.50 in costs. The exact arithmetic of how these figures interact is somewhat muddied in the sources: multiple accounts describe the award as “$250” or as “about $250,” which appears to be a rounding of the base award plus the ten-percent addition, or a rounded figure that has circulated in subsequent summaries. The most careful primary-source-based accounts — including the coverage in Frederick Douglass’ Paper and the analysis compiled from court records — describe the jury award as $225, with costs adding $22.50 for a combined figure slightly above $247. Both the Courts Society source and the Singer primary source analysis support $225 as the jury’s verdict; the “$250” figure that appears in other accounts appears to be a rounded or approximated summary. Neither precisely matches the “$250 plus $22.50 costs” formulation that some sources use.