Lawyers

As in most all legal disputes, there were lawyers on both sides of the St. Louis freedom suits. It may seem surprising, but some freedom suits were driven by complicated strategies that were not designed to help the freedom seeker. We will put those cases on a longer arc for exploration. Our first forays will be into profiling lawyers who represented the freedom seekers in those cases. As mentioned above, however, it was not as uncommon as we might assume that the same lawyers represented freedom seekers in some cases and enslavers in other cases. Very few lawyers represented only the freedom seekers.

We must bear in mind, too, that St. Louis in the first half of the 1800’s was a small town by our more modern standards. As such, the number of lawyers was fairly small and presumably they would know each other and know the judges who presided over the freedom suits.

[This segment of the Virtual Learning Center is under construction and will be added to in the near future with profiles of lawyers.]