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 elsewhere herein, however, it was not as uncommon as we might assume that the some 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 available lawyers was fairly small and presumably they would know each other and know the judges who presided over the freedom suits. With that context, it may seem almost surprising that more than 80 attorneys represented parties in the 326 St. Louis freedom suits brought over the almost 50-year span; but perhaps not, when one remembers there are two sets of attorneys for each case – plaintiff and defendant.

We have always made clear that the freedom seekers themselves took the most dangerous of risks in suing for their freedom. Still those in the legal profession who helped them were certainly not always praised by the public. Anthony Sestric wrote in his “57 Years”: “St. Louis lawyers were not universally praised for their efforts to free slaves. Reminiscent of today’s claims that plaintiff lawyers sue for profit, filing baseless suits, the local press in the early 1800s muttered similar accusations. Proslavery St. Louis claimed St. Louis lawyers hungry for business, were abusing the right to sue for their own personal gain and that the ‘liberty of suing for freedom has become abused by the left-handed profiteering lawyers’ who encourage slaves to tell their friends, who then go back to the first lawyer, and so forth.” (57 Years, a p. 15-16).

For the list below, we owe a debt of gratitude to the amazing and meticulous work of Prof. Anne Twitty in her book Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857 (2016), as well as to St. Louis attorney, Anthony J. Sestric, who wrote 57 Years: A History of the Freedom Suits in the Missouri Courts (2012)(see Recommended Reading, herein). Out of an abundance of caution, names may include in brackets, a possible alternative spelling. This is not a disagreement between the authors. Rather, it is simply due to the difficulty of interpreting cursive writing on documents, some of which are more than 150 years old.  

Paul Venker, FSMF President
January 2026

— A —
Beverly Allen

— B —
David Barton
Joshua Barton
John N. Bass
Edward Bates
Samuel Mansfield Bay
William V. N. Bay
Adam Beaty
John Bent
Thomas Hart Benton
Gustavus A. Bird
Edward C. Blackburn
Montgomery Blair
Richard S. Blannenhassett
Lewis V. Bogg [Bogy]
James B. Bowlin
Samuel M. Bowman
David C. Briggs
Aylett H. Buckner

           –C–
John W. Campbell
L.T. Carr
William Chase
Charles C. Carroll
Joseph Charless
Henry L. Cobb
Tully R. Cormick
John Coulter
Horatio Cozens
Nathaniel Cox
John B. Crockett
Joseph B. Crockett

              –D–
John F. Darby
James Daugherty
Andrew J. Davis
Charles H. Davis
John Davis
Andrew H. H. Dawson
Benjamin B. Dayton
Henry Dedman
Franklin A. Dick
Charles D. Drake
J. McKim Duncan

              — E —
Rufus Easton
John C. Edwards

             — F —
Benjamin G. Farrar
Robert Farris
Abraham Fenley
Alexander P. Field
Roswell M. Field
Stephen W. Foreman

              — G —
F. W. Gale
Hamilton R. Gamble
Thomas T. Gantt
Alexander J. P. Garesche
Alexander Garland
Henry S. Geyer
Robert C. Gist
Samuel T. Glover
James R. Goff
George W. Goode
Pierce C. Grace

            –H–
David N. Hall
Chester M. Harding
Henry N. Hart
Thomas Harvey
P. H. Hastings
Charles S. Haven
Charles S. Hempstead
Thomas B. Hudson
Logan Hunton

— J —
A. S. James
Charles P. Johnson

            –K–
Alexander [Archibald] King
John B. King
B. J. Knott
Thomas M. Knox
S. Knox
John M. Krum [Krumm]

            –L–
B. E. Lackland
P. Albert Ladue
Jeremiah Langton
Luke E. Lawless
C. Learned
Charles Edmund LeBeaume
Miron Leslie
Charles B. Lord

            –M–
Arthur L. Magenis
A.W. Manning
James S. Mayfield
Milton N. McLean
Isaac C. McGirk
Mathias McGirk
William M. McPherson
Philip C. Morehead
Francis B. Murdoch
James L. Murray

— N —
George W. Nabb
James N. Nelson
John Newman

            — P–
James H. Peek
Rufus Pettibone
Spencer Pettis
Wilson Primm

            — R —
Charles S. Rannells
Joel C. Richmond
Thomas F. Risk
Ferdinand W. Risque

— S —
Fidelio C. Sharp
George D. Shaw
John R. Shepley
Luther M. Shreve
Elias B. Smith
Josiah Spalding
Harris L. Sproat
George Strother
J. T. S. Sullivan

— T —
Micajah Tarver
George R. Taylor
Primm L. Taylor
Benjamin F. Thomas
John B. Thompson
W. Broadus Thompson
Pardon Dexter Tiffany
J. B. Townshend
Joseph W. Tucker
Warrick Tunstall

            –W —
John B. Walker
Joseph Wells
Alphonso Whitmore
Willis L. Williams
Goodridge R. Woodson
Uriel Wright

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