Resisting Slavery in St. Louis, 1764–1865

"The Last Sale of Slaves," by Thomas Satterwhite Noble. Missouri Historical Society.

For about a hundred years — 1764 to 1865 — slavery existed in St. Louis, under France, Spain and then the United States. The rules shifted from one government to the next, but all of them treated enslaved African Americans as property, with laws meant to strip away their humanity. Enslaved people resisted throughout, and their resistance helped break the institution down.

The laws

Under the Code Noir (French and Spanish rule, 1764–1803):

• Some protections: families could not be separated; enslaved people could be educated, work for extra money on Sundays, and even own businesses and property.
• Harsh limits: they had to convert to Catholicism, giving up traditional beliefs; could not leave their enslaver's land without permission; and faced branding, whipping, disfigurement and even execution for serious offenses.

Under the United States (from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803):

• Families torn apart: besides long hours of labor, enslaved people now faced separation from their families. Henry Shaw, founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden, enslaved a woman named Esther; when she was caught trying to escape across the Mississippi to Illinois, he sold her down river, away from her children.
• 1847: a Missouri law made it illegal to teach enslaved or free African Americans to read or write, restricted their gatherings, and banned free Black people from moving to Missouri.

Everyday resistance

Most resistance was nonviolent (violent revolts, like Nat Turner's in Virginia in 1831, happened elsewhere):

• slowing work, breaking tools and feigning illness;
• buying freedom, in the rare cases where earning money outside regular work was allowed;
• suing in court, as in the famous Dred Scott case;
• running away — at the risk of recapture, and of never seeing family again.

What Julia Dent Grant didn't see

The memoirs of Julia Dent Grant — wife of Ulysses S. Grant — look back fondly on slavery at her family's farm, White Haven. She described the enslaved people there as happy, her father as kind and indulgent, and the farm's food as theirs to share — never acknowledging that their labor produced it. Yet her own stories show resistance:

• Bob, an older man, would "get religion" and go to pray and sing by a walnut tree far off in the meadow.
• "Old Bob," who tended the house fires, would let them go out, then walk a mile to a neighbor's to fetch fire.
• Her "menservants" — Charles, Bob, Willis, William and Jim — used her standing with her father to get extra tobacco, winter provisions, and permission to visit or bring gifts to family members enslaved on nearby farms.

What she read as carelessness or piety gave Bob time away from the Dents' watch — subtle resistance that was surely not unique to White Haven.

Sources

Based on "Fighting Back Against the Shackles of Slavery in St. Louis," Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, National Park Service, drawing on The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, which are paraphrased here; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article names the botanical garden's founder "Henry Saw." Painting: Missouri Historical Society.