The Challenge of Litigating Freedom

Recent years have seen the publication of excellent new scholarship on “freedom suits,” legal action by enslaved African Americans to obtain release from bondage. Loren Schweninger’s Appealing for Liberty adds to this growing body of literature by offering unparalleled geographic breadth and temporal scope, making this the most comprehensive book on such suits available. This is not simply a book about slavery, courts, and the law, however. Records of freedom suits, Schweninger explains, are “social and legal history fused” (p. 6) and offer insights into the experiences, values, and desires of enslaved Americans.

Much of the strength of this book derives from Schweninger’s massive source base. Freedom suits are difficult to locate because they are intermixed with other cases in local court records. As a result, most scholarship on freedom suits has focused on a handful of cases or utilized records from a confined geographic region. This book draws on 2,023 lawsuits, involving 4,601 plaintiffs, representing 200 counties in 15 states and the District of Columbia, filed between 1779 and 1863. Schweninger has spent much of his career working to gather this documentary evidence as director of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and founder of the Digital Library on American Slavery.

The bills of complaint, depositions, affidavits, and sometimes even oral testimony represent a unique, arguably unparalleled, collection of what the author calls “contemporary and real-time testimony” (p. 4) by enslaved African Americans. Schweninger recognizes that this testimony was frequently filtered through third parties, most often attorneys, and that those who filed freedom suits were but a small fraction of the entire enslaved population. Nonetheless there is still much to be learned from this evidence about the vulnerabilities, aspirations, and lives of enslaved people, relationships between and among them, and their connections with members of free communities.

Appealing for Liberty begins with an exploration of the role of women in freedom suits and an analysis of how sex, gender, and culture interacted to make information about maternal ancestry both important and contested. Slave states adhered to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, meaning that slave status followed that of the mother. Knowledge about maternal ancestry was thus valuable information that was passed on from generation to generation especially by free blacks. Partly because of its legal utility, knowledge of family heritage was a vital part of African American culture. African American women played a central role in keeping this history. White slaveowners paid more attention to slave maternity in contrast to paternity, which they often had reason to obscure. Native American maternal ancestry could also be the basis for a freedom claim, since states at various times outlawed Native American slavery. Freedom suits also reflected gendered experiences with regard to self-purchase and the purchase of spouses and family members. Enslaved men had more lucrative opportunities on the labor market, so their role often revolved around saving money and making claims to purchase.

Enslaved people had several legal grounds on which to claim free status, each of which is given a chapter-length consideration. Those who had been granted freedom by a will or deed used courts to enforce that promise, as did term slaves— individuals promised freedom at a certain age or after a certain time period. Those born to free women could claim freedom, but those born to enslaved mothers who subsequently achieved freedom usually could not. Sometimes residence in free states or countries could offer grounds for legal assertions of freedom, though many states made provisions for “sojourners” whose visit was deemed temporary and thus did not affect slave status.

Schweninger’s book significantly expands our understanding of state-level and regional variations in freedom suits, variations that belie regional differences in the larger slave experience. The central finding with regard to region is that the Upper South saw a much larger number of suits filed. The freedom suits considered here do not represent all such...