Betsey's Writ: A Seven-Year-Old's Freedom Case in Philadelphia, 1786

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court used writs of habeas corpus to order jailers to bring a detained person before a judge. On January 21, 1786, Chief Justice Thomas McKean — a signer of the Declaration of Independence — issued one for "Bet a Negro woman." She was seven years old.

Whose child?

Betsey's father, Cato, had taken her from her enslaver. The enslaver wanted her back. The writ, and a note added to it that June, record the few facts of her birth — and those facts became the heart of a groundbreaking case, Respublica v. Negroe Betsey (1789): the first test of the registration rule in Pennsylvania's 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, and a precedent for freedom seekers in the new nation's earliest freedom suits.

The document

The writ, in the Pennsylvania State Archives (Writs of Habeas Corpus for Black Slaves and Indentured Servants, 1784–1787, roll 3403), is online at pages 43 and 47. Its first page commands the jailer — the name Thomas Harrison struck out and Robert Milligan written in — to bring her before the chief justice:

We command you that the body of Bet a Negro woman in prison under your custody as it is said detained by whatsoever name the said Bet may be held charged in the [same?] under safe and secure conduct together with the day and cause of her [being?] taken and detained you have before the Honorable Thomas McKean Esquire Doctor of Laws Chief Justice of our Supreme Court at his Chambers in third street in the City of Philadelphia at ten o'clock of the forenoon of the Eighth day of March next…

It is dated the twenty-first of January MDCCLXXXVI and signed by Tho McKean and by the court's prothonotary, Edw Burd.

On the back, on June 29, 1786, both sides agreed on the facts:

That the said Negro Betsey was born on the 22nd [November] 1779 of the body of Negro Poll then a Slave to Samuel Moore and that the said Negro Betsy was not registered ["agreeably to" crossed out] under the Act for the gradual Abolition of Slavery. That the said Negro Betsy was born within this State and hath remained with the said Samuel within it from the time of her Birth and that the said Samuel Moore junior by order of the said Samuel Moore the elder took and detained the said Negro Betsy for the Cause aforesaid.

Sources

Based on "Writ of Habeas Corpus for Betsey, January 21, 1786," Independence National Historical Park, National Park Service, with the transcript of the writ courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The imported copy was cut short at the link to Cato's writ; the missing text is from the live page.