Shifting Ground: St. Louis Freedom Suits in the Era of Dred Scott

Individuals held illegally in slavery had few options for establishing legal freedom.  Using St. Louis court records, this paper traces how some enslaved individuals sued for freedom, directly challenging their alleged owners in court.  Despite limited options, freedom suit plaintiffs worked within the bounds of the law to carve out advantages for themselves and their descendants.  In doing so, they entered into public disputes over personal status that had both local, and national, political implications. 

The story of freedom suits in St. Louis changed dramatically in the years surrounding the famous United States Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which closed off a popular argument for freedom and reflected the growing sectionalism of the era.  Although options for freedom contracted during the late 1840s and 1850s in St. Louis, when the outcomes of freedom suits adjusted, they did so in ways that did not necessarily fit the pattern of increasing restrictions on personal liberty.  Instead, the unique political situation in St. Louis in the 1840s and 1850s, with its increasingly anti-slavery immigrant population and growing Republican majority, combined to allow a higher rate of success in court for freedom suit plaintiffs.  Although the shifts in Missouri state law worked to limit the overall number of freedom suits, local judges and juries failed to decide a single case in favor of a slaveholding defendant between 1846 and 1860.  Combining scholarship in the fields of law and history, this paper seeks to explain the context for these changes, considering national political trends and how St. Louis’s local courts broke from regionalism and established a controversial jurisprudence around freedom suits at the close of the antebellum era.