The Freedom Suits

Between the Louisiana Purchase and the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 300 enslaved people demanded their freedom in the St. Louis circuit court.

The legal cases that resulted from these efforts are known as “freedom suits.”

Freedom suits had emerged in other jurisdictions, but St. Louis became home to one of the largest collections of such cases in the United States.

Enslaved people’s right to sue for their freedom was established in Missouri’s territorial and state laws. Those who filed suit asserted that they were legally free people who had been deprived of their liberty, and initiated cases by petitioning the St. Louis Circuit Court for permission to sue.

Plaintiffs made a variety of different arguments about why they were entitled to freedom. A small number asserted that they were descended from Native American women who lived west of the Mississippi River, where the enslavement of native people had been made illegal by the Spanish in the eighteenth century. Many more alleged that they had been made free in some kind of earlier agreement. A former enslaver, for example, had manumitted them or declared them free in their will. In other instances, plaintiffs had entered into a contract with an enslaver to purchase their own freedom and had held up their end of the bargain.

The majority of plaintiffs, however, asserted that they were free because they–or their mothers–had previously traveled to and resided in free territories and states. The legal theory they relied on, called “once free, always free,” held that an enslaved person who had been moved to a free territory or state for any length of time who was then returned to a slave territory or state was entitled to their freedom.

Dred and Harriet Scott were one such set of plaintiffs. They filed their first freedom suits in the St. Louis circuit court in 1846 after spending time in both free territories and states. For the next eleven years, the Scotts would pursue their freedom in a variety of venues, including not only the St. Louis circuit court, but the Missouri Supreme Court, the United States district court, and, eventually, the United States Supreme Court. Although many like the Scotts had won such cases, neither Dred nor Harriet were successful.

The United States Supreme Court case that resulted from their efforts, moreover, is generally considered the worst in the history of the Court. Dred Scott v. Sanford held that all people of African ancestry — enslaved as well as free — could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories.

The decision in 1857 propelled the United States toward the Civil War four years later.