Law, Geography, and Mobility: Suing for Freedom in Antebellum St. Louis

Research on slavery and the law has flourished over the past two decades, and freedom suits are a growing field for historical inquiry within this larger literature.9 Much of the current work on freedom suits has focused on bringing scholarly attention to slaves' cases and highlighting this type of litigation in particular locations-including Massachusetts, Louisiana, Virginia, and France.10 A broader current in the scholarship has emphasized how subordinated peoples-such as slaves, free people of color, and women-used the law in somewhat surprising ways, finding avenues for influencing legal processes through their testimony and their petitions, even when mostly kept silent by the constraints of the system.11 Finally, two closely related bodies of work examine the importance of mobility for slaves and free people of color and the significance of geographic location and jurisdiction to how places and courts dealt with questions of personal status.12 Using the cases of slaves suing for their freedom in St. Louis, this article builds on these currents in the historiography to examine the meaning of slaves' participation in the legal system and to argue for a wider discussion of the unsettled nature of legal categories, suggesting that slavery and freedom were never absolute, especially for those individuals with access to the courts.13 Instead, elite white slaveholders and African Americans each used the law to exploit the benefits of certain jurisdictions and particular legal strategies, and in so doing, some Africandescended people managed to demonstrate a degree of legal savvy that rivaled that of their white oppressors.