Judges

The judges who presided over the St. Louis freedom suits, as well as those brought in other parts of a young Missouri, showed the importance of the Rule of Law in the administration of justice. Even though there were more than 300 St. Louis freedom suits, it was a relative handful of judges who presided over those cases. We may need to be reminded that judges are also people and, as such, they may have their own personal biases on issues and disputes which come before them. The cases also demonstrate that judges followed the Rule of Law in presiding over the cases, fully realizing it could separate a freedom seeker from an enslaver, despite the judges themselves being enslavers.

Under both the 1807 freedom statute and those that followed in 1824 and later, the judge was given the role of “gatekeeper”. That is, a potential freedom seeking plaintiff had to first file an application with the court, to set out facts showing they were wrongly held in slavery. The judge would make a determination, kind of like a “probable cause” determination that the facts, if true, could mean the person was entitled to be legally a free person. Sometimes that initial determination would be later found to be in error by an appellate court.

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