“Insisting upon Her Being Free”: Plassy Lawrence’s Unstable Claim to Liberty

Plassy Lawrence was born enslaved in British colonial Nevis around 1800. In 1817 she ran away from her mother’s home with an enslaved sailor intending to escape her servitude and elope. They went to Danish St. Thomas, where they were apprehended and handed over to the governor for return. Lawrence eluded her capture and hid in the homes of other enslaved people on St. Thomas while planning her escape. Amidst her second attempt at flight slave traders seized Lawrence and shipped her to Puerto Rico and where she would be traded several times. Her last Puerto Rican owner sold her to Cuba, and there Plassy was also exchanged between white men of means several more times over the next three decades. In 1851, Lawrence sought out Cuba’s British consul to make a formal push for her freedom via self-advocacy as a British subject. Consular records note that over 30 years of illegal servitude Lawrence insisted upon right to freedom with every new owner. The exchanged correspondence between the Spanish and British authorities exposed the distress of her servitude via explicit mentions of labor abuse and implicit hints at sexual abuse and prostitution. The consul affirmed her subjecthood and approved her freedom appeal in 1851; but the Spanish authorities in Cuba challenged the emancipation decision, while the men who enslaved her denied ever having held her. Lawrence eventually decided to take matters into her own hands and flee from Cuban state possession after an unresolved two-year wait for their officials to enact her manumission. Her 1853 flight and subsequent disappearance from the record reinforce the unreliability of even “successful” claims to British subjecthood as protection from the vagaries of bondage.