“Just As Free As You Are”: Individual Lives, Local Communities, and the Establishment of Freedom in the Law

Slaves who were illegally held in slavery had few available options for establishing their freedom.  Suing for freedom was one method these individuals used to obtain legal freedom, and in the antebellum years, thousands of slaves took advantage of this possibility by bringing suits to local courts throughout the southern states.  This paper argues that by challenging their enslavement in freedom suits, slaves took an active role in blurring the legal definition of slavery. Slavery and freedom were not fixed legal categories, even in the late antebellum years.  Slaves drew on both their individual stories and their communities’ norms to present their cases to the court and help establish methods for determining who was a slave and who was free. 

Using local court records from St. Louis and appellate records from across the southern states, this paper traces how individual slaves brought suit for freedom, drawing on their personal histories and their communities’ support to prove their right to freedom.  Although the structural inequalities inherent in the slave system severely limited their options, enslaved plaintiffs in freedom suits (and their white attorneys) worked within the bounds of the law to carve out advantages and win legal freedom.  Navigating the various legal strata required a degree of legal acumen not typically associated with subjugated peoples. Enslaved individuals’ ability to maneuver through the tributaries of American law suggests the existence of a broader legal culture among slaves and free people of color than historians generally recognize. In addition, the testimony of white community members who recognized the possibility of “wrongful” or illegal enslavement reveals one way in which the boundaries of personal status remained up for popular debate, thereby complicating our understandings of the construction of slavery and freedom in antebellum America.