| dc.description.abstract |
<p>Slavery and freedom are central issues in the historiography of nineteenth-century
America. In the antebellum era (1820-1860), personal status was a fluid concept and
was never as simple as black and white. The courts provide a revealing window for
examining these ambiguities because court cases often served as the venue for negotiations
over who was enslaved and who was free. In St. Louis, enslaved men and women contributed
to debates and discussions about the meaning of personal status by suing for their
freedom. By questioning their enslavement in freedom suits, slaves played an important
role in blurring the law's understanding of slavery; in the process, they incurred
the enormous personal risks of abuse and the possibility of sale. </p><p>Using the
records of over 300 slaves who sued for freedom, as well as a variety of manuscript
sources, newspapers, and additional court records, this project traces these freedom
suits over time, and examines how slave law and the law of freedom suits shifted,
mainly in response to local and national debates over slavery and also to the growing
threat of anti-slavery encroachment into St. Louis. When the laws tightened in response
to these threats, the outcomes of freedom suits also adjusted, but in ways that did
not fit the pattern of increasing restrictions on personal liberty. Instead, the
unique situation in St. Louis in the 1840s and 1850s, with its increasingly anti-slavery
immigrant population, allowed slaves suing for freedom to succeed at greater rates
than in previous decades.</p>
|
|
