Slavery and the Law in Missouri: Slave Codes and Freedom Suits

The St. Louis Courthouse under construction, 1851. Missouri Historical Society.

"No law . . . can protect me from the hands of the slaveholder!" — William Wells Brown

Laws that tightened slavery

During Missouri's first forty years as a state, a series of laws regulated slavery:

St. Louis ordinances reinforced these laws: an enslaved person moving about the city had to carry a pass from their enslaver, and if arrested, the enslaver could be fined and the enslaved person sent to the city workhouse.

"Once free, always free"

The colonial-era Code Noir let enslaved people sue if they believed they were wrongly enslaved, and Missouri kept that right after statehood — unlike most Southern slave states. St. Louis courts heard 287 "freedom suits" from 1810 to 1860; 110 of them (38%) won freedom by court order.

• Winny had been enslaved for several years in Illinois, where slavery was outlawed. She sued in St. Louis in 1818, and in 1824 the Missouri Supreme Court declared her free. After her case, the courts embraced the precedent "once free, always free."
• Phillis, a free Black woman from Philadelphia, was seized in St. Louis in 1822 by a White man, Reddin B. Herring, and sold into slavery in Louisiana. She sued in 1836; the court declared her free and ordered Herring to pay $5,000 in lost wages — though the case was later dismissed when she missed a court date.
• Dred and Harriet Scott: Dred's enslaver, Dr. John Emerson, broke the law by taking them into Illinois and Wisconsin Territory, both free. Urged by Harriet, Dred filed a freedom suit in 1846. The Scotts first won, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed it. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott should not be freed and that no Black American, free or enslaved, could be a citizen; Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that Black Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Shortly before the Civil War began in April 1861, St. Louis congressman John Richard Barret chided antislavery Northerners for not accepting the decision as "the supreme law of the land."

Dred and Harriet Scott. NPS.

Lucy Delaney

Lucy Delaney, from her book of 1891, From Darkness Cometh the Light.

Lucy Delaney (c. 1828–1830 to 1910) is the only person known to have written a first-person account of a freedom suit.

• Her mother: Lucy was born enslaved in St. Louis, but her mother, Polly Wash, had earlier been held illegally in Illinois. Wash won her own freedom suit in the early 1840s, then sued for her daughter in 1842.
• Jail: awaiting trial, Lucy was held for seventeen months in a dark, cold, foul jail in the basement of the St. Louis Courthouse — today's Old Courthouse. She won her freedom.
• Later life: her 1891 book, From Darkness Cometh the Light, tells of her mother's efforts. She worked as a seamstress, was married forty-two years to Zachariah Delaney, with whom she had four children, and was active in charities and the Women's Relief Corps, which supported Union veterans.

"Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" — the emblem of Britain's anti-slavery society, showing an enslaved man asserting his humanity. Public domain.

Part of the NPS series The History of Slavery in St. Louis. Previous: The Code Noir and the Missouri Compromise. Next: The Slave Trade in St. Louis.

Sources

Based on "Slavery and the Law," Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.