Resisting Slavery in St. Louis: From Broken Tools to the Underground Railroad

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Part of the National Park Service series The History of Slavery in St. Louis.

Everyday resistance

Black St. Louisans resisted enslavement in ways large and small. Some deliberately worked slowly, pretended to be ill, or broke tools to disrupt the work.

A green two-storey wooden house among trees, behind a white fence

White Haven, at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site. NPS.

Julia Dent Grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, grew up at White Haven, a St. Louis plantation. She remembered that an enslaved man called Old Bob often got "careless and let his fires go out" while cutting firewood, so that "he would have to walk a mile to some neighbors and bring home a brand of fire from their backlog." She never understood that his slowness was quiet resistance, a way out from under the Dent family's eyes.

Music was resistance too, a coded language and a way to build community. Julia remembered Old Bob would "pray and sing... he would give out the hymn, two lines at a time, and then sing it all by himself." Spirituals like his inspired blues, jazz, rock and hip-hop, and are among America's greatest cultural gifts to the world.

Seeking freedom

A woodcut of a man running with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder, captioned "Fugitive slave as advertised for capture"

A freedom seeker. New York Public Library.

Running away. Freedom seekers often made for Illinois, sometimes with help from the Underground Railroad, crossing the Mississippi by boat and going on by horse or on foot. Whole families sometimes fled together; these "stampedes" usually numbered five or more. In one month of 1854, forty enslaved people escaped St. Louis, and a local paper blamed the "numerous underground railroad agents that infest our city." Not all succeeded: Mattie Jackson fled with her mother in 1852 but was caught in Illinois, brought back, and sold at auction.
Armed resistance. Rare, but real. Moses Dickson led the Knights of Liberty, a Black fraternal organisation in St. Louis that backed an armed revolution in 1846 and had roughly 47,000 members across the South. When the Civil War broke out fifteen years later, a group of Englishmen sent Dickson arms and ammunition. The Knights never fought as a unit, but many members enlisted in the U.S. Army.
The courts. Some enslaved people sued for their freedom in St. Louis courts; see Slavery and the Law.
Self-purchase. Some enslavers let enslaved people earn money in their spare time to buy their freedom. Elizabeth Keckley, an enslaved seamstress whose dresses were prized by wealthy St. Louisans, bought her freedom in 1855 with a loan she repaid over years of long hours.
Manumission. A few enslavers freed people by a legal document. Ulysses S. Grant freed William Jones at the St. Louis Courthouse on March 29, 1859. Freedom was sometimes a reward for service, but not always charity: enslavers also used manumission to rid themselves of elderly people who could no longer work.

A long-sleeved purple dress of the 1800s

A dress by Elizabeth Keckley, whose sales paid for her freedom. Smithsonian Institution.

Mary and John Berry Meachum

A photograph of an older Black woman in a white bonnet and patterned dress

Mary Meachum in the 1860s. Public domain.

Mary (died 1869) and John Berry Meachum (1789–1854) were prominent abolitionists and Underground Railroad conductors in St. Louis. John, born in Virginia, and Mary, born in Kentucky, had both been enslaved as children. A skilled carpenter, cabinetmaker and cooper, John bought his own and his father's freedom, and in St. Louis bought the freedom of Mary and their children.

Some abolitionists bought enslaved people at auction to free them. John did so with a twist: he first trained the men in carpentry and other trades. Not everyone approved of a practice that straddled freedom and slavery, and some of his workers sued him for their freedom, but between 1826 and 1836 he freed twenty men who had worked in his shop. The Meachums founded the First African Baptist Church at Third and Almond Streets, where their Sunday school taught Black St. Louisans, free and enslaved, to read and write.

Mary helped freedom seekers cross to the free state of Illinois. On May 21, 1855, she helped nine try to cross the Mississippi, but the attempt failed: a few escaped, while Mary and six others were arrested. The case against her was later dropped for unknown reasons. One of the group, Esther, was separated from her children and sold down the river by her enslaver, Henry Shaw, the prominent businessman who founded the Missouri Botanical Garden.

A print of freedom seekers boarding a ship at night

Freedom seekers boarding a ship. University of Virginia Special Collections.

Rivers were often part of the route to freedom, and hundreds if not thousands of freedom seekers crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis into Illinois before the Civil War.