What the Record Allows: Chinese Witnesses and the Limits of the Archive
- jtecco
- 6 minutes ago
- 3 min read
In 1854, the California Supreme Court’s decision in People v. Hall formalized racial exclusion by interpreting Chinese witnesses as legally equivalent to “Black, Indian, or Mulatto” persons, thereby barring them from testifying against white defendants. In contrast, Cincinnati did not employ explicit racial exclusion. Instead, it relied on an oath-competency framework that required witnesses to demonstrate belief in a Supreme Being and divine punishment. While framed as a neutral religious test, this requirement functioned as a racialized gatekeeping mechanism, forcing Chinese witnesses to perform Christian moral legitimacy to be heard in court.
While working on my digital mapping project, I came across an 1878 newspaper article titled “The Heathen Chinee as a Lawful Witness.” The article covered the trial of John Dudley, who was accused of robbing a Chinese laundry. The witnesses were the proprietor, Joe Sing, and a man identified as Ah Chung. The prefix “Ah” was not a first name but a Cantonese familiar marker placed before a given name. Nineteenth-century newspapers and census records frequently mistook it for a legal first name, flattening Chinese naming conventions and creating lasting barriers to tracing family lineage and identity.

What struck me most was that these two Chinese men were ultimately permitted to testify. Given the broader anti-Chinese legal climate of the nineteenth century, I initially assumed their testimony might have been barred. However, further research revealed that Cincinnati operated under an oath-competency requirement rather than an explicit racial exclusion statute. The question was not race on its face, but religion. General Hoadly, counsel for Dudley, challenged Sing and Chung by arguing that a witness “must believe in a God” for an oath to hold legal weight. Before they could be heard, their spiritual legitimacy was scrutinized. Only after Sing and Chung affirmed their belief in God and in divine punishment for wrongdoing were they deemed competent to testify.
I tend to view history as inherently incomplete, especially the histories of marginalized communities. When it comes to early Chinese life in Cincinnati, much of the context, the texture of daily life, relationships, belief systems, and interior humanity, remains outside the archive. The fact that Sing and Chung were allowed to testify reveals an important political and social dynamic. They were living in a society structurally exclusionary toward them, yet they were granted access to legal standing, but only after demonstrating religious conformity. In order to be heard, they had to submit to a Christian oath framework. Their inclusion was conditional.
What I found just as significant, however, was the quiet detail that Joe Sing had been in Cincinnati for seven years. That places him in the city around 1871 or 1872, predating Hung Lee and his compatriots' settlement in Cincinnati in 1873. This single line complicates the narrative of arrival and settlement. The archive does not always tell us who was first; it tells us who was recorded.
John Dudley was ultimately found guilty of robbing the Chinese laundry and sentenced to two years in the penitentiary. On the surface, the case appears to represent a measure of justice. Yet even here, the record feels incomplete. Who was John Dudley? Was he white? Was he Black? Did his racial identity shape the court’s willingness to allow Sing and Chung to testify?

These questions matter because race structured access to legal power in the nineteenth century. If Dudley were white, then the decision to admit Chinese testimony would become even more significant within the broader climate of anti-Chinese sentiment. If he were Black, that introduces a different racial dynamic, one shaped by post-Reconstruction hierarchies and shifting legal boundaries. The newspaper does not tell us. And that silence is instructive. The verdict may appear straightforward, but the racial context surrounding it remains obscured, reminding me again that what is absent from the record often carries as much weight as what is preserved. Every document answers one question and raises three more. That is not a flaw of history; it is the work.
