Zoe Zimmermann
One of the many paradoxes of Indigenous enslavement is that, in many regions, the practice flourished well after it was supposedly abolished. The Stolen Relations research team is constantly astonished at the number of cases we discover after colonies and states passed laws against enslaving Indigenous people and even after the 13th amendment. Slaveholders used a variety of tactics to keep Indigenous people in bondage, such as claiming that they were actually African, relying on arcane and confusing legislation, refusing to keep written records, and even selling their slaves out of state if anyone became suspicious. As the condition of slavery was passed between generations, identifying those who were free by law became an exceptionally difficult task.
Still, there are numerous instances of enslaved Indigenous individuals and families who managed to trace their lineage to a wrongfully enslaved ancestor and prove their freedom in court. These cases, known as “freedom suits,” are the subject of this blog post. In British America and the United States, most claims to freedom depended on a legal premise known as partus sequitur ventrem, which meant that the legal status of children would always follow the mother. Thus, the children of enslaved women would always be legally enslavable, but the children of free women should legally be free, regardless of the father’s status. While partus sequitur ventrem was most typically used to keep the children of enslaved women in slavery, over time enslaved Indigenous people used it to gain their freedom by demonstrating that they had a free maternal ancestor (and then therefore that freedom should have been passed along to successive generations). In some cases, questions of free maternal ancestors intersected with questions of legal enslavement in the first place, making court decisions and determinations even more complicated. And proving one’s family history to an often unsympathetic court with little or no written evidence could be next to impossible.
In 1807, these hurdles to freedom were made abundantly clear to Pallas, an Indigenous man who sued for his freedom in Virginia. Maddeningly complicated legal issues, a lack of resources, and even the threat of death were challenges faced by anyone attempting to find freedom in the courtroom. Pallas’ story is one in which the shortcomings of an obtuse colonial bureaucracy nearly sentenced a man and all of his relatives to a life of slavery.
It seemed like Pallas had a good case for his freedom. He was descended from Bess, an Indigenous woman who was enslaved in 1703, seemingly from somewhere outside Virginia. Though Pallas never knew his ancestor, the legal status of her enslavement formed the central dilemma for his case. Indigenous enslavement was presumed to be illegal in Virginia in 1807, when the court heard Pallas’ case, but whether it was illegal in 1703 was another question altogether. Because legal records were poorly maintained, no one really knew exactly when Indigenous enslavement had been outlawed in Virginia. Pallas’ attorneys supposed that it was in 1691, but the opposing counsel denied that. Neither side could be proven right, though, because no one could find the law in question.
The circumstances under which this law “went missing” are sketchy at best—attorneys claimed that since destruction was “naturally incident to books and papers of this kind,” then “it could not reasonably be presumed that many copies…would still be found in existence.” Yet this seemingly minor discrepancy meant the difference between freedom and slavery for Pallas. Without evidence, the lower court ruled in favor of Pallas’ owner.
Yet Pallas and his fellow plaintiffs would not give up so easily; they appealed their case to a higher court, despite the fact that that process could take several years. By this point, many of Pallas’ relatives living on other plantations had gotten wind of the fact that they, too, may have been able to claim their rightful freedom. These other descendants of Bess—Bridget, James, Tabb, Hannah, Sam, and many others whose names do not appear in the court records—filed individual freedom suits against their respective owners in Petersburg around the same time. Their collaboration offers a window into the kin-based communication networks amongst enslaved families in nineteenth-century Virginia as they likely shared legal advice, resources, and support right under their owner’s noses.
When these cases reached the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, the court saw all six at once. At the trial, Pallas’ attorney, the prominent Virginia lawyer George K. Taylor, finally produced evidence of the 1691 act. In order to find it, Taylor had traveled to Monticello, the home of President Thomas Jefferson, to procure a manuscript version of the act. Nevertheless, the court still doubted the law’s authenticity and went as far as to analyze the handwriting in order to figure out if it had ever been officially enacted. It was not until the following year that yet another copy of the same law, also from 1691, would be discovered. At that point, the court determined that it would be too much of a coincidence to find two fraudulent acts from the same year, and thus finally ruled that the 1691 act was legitimate.
After several long years of judicial confusion, Pallas and his family were finally granted freedom. But the horrible irony about it is that the “missing law” was, in fact, not missing at all—it had even been cited in a separate freedom suit just a few decades prior. It was only the oversight of the judges and attorneys involved in the case that caused the debate to drag on for multiple years.
Despite all the trouble the “missing law” caused, these convoluted legal details reflected in the court records only scratch the surface of the difficulties that enslaved families faced throughout the multiyear court process. The details provided in the record do not even begin to provide answers about how people were able to trace their genealogy, secure resources, or find sympathetic lawyers—let alone do these things all while protecting themselves from the wrath of a master who would not have been keen on losing labor.
Every once in a while, though, the dangerous stakes of freedom suits poke out in the record. One of Pallas’ other relatives, Abner, likewise attempted to sue his owner, Thomas Hardaway in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. His case, though, never made it in front of the court—Hardaway murdered Abner before any legal proceedings could occur.
I am not inclined to believe that Abner was the only person who suffered a terrible fate in attempting to file a freedom suit. It seems more plausible that household abuse would only have magnified upon a slave’s claim to freedom, but these are stories that we almost certainly will never know. We are lucky that Abner’s story still exists—ironically, the report of his murder in another freedom suit was ruled to be hearsay and stricken from the record.
Despite the innumerable risks posed by the quest for freedom, dozens of freedom suits were taken up throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, court records, while detailed and thorough from a legal perspective, almost completely erase the words of the enslaved individuals themselves, providing at best a dim glow onto their actual lived experiences. By centralizing these stories, Stolen Relations offers a way to see past the scant archival evidence and connect families across political boundaries and generational divides. We’ve amassed dozens of offhand remarks and genealogical references from freedom suits which, together, clearly prove that kinship and identity persisted among enslaved communities in the face of legal scrutiny. Within the database, we are able to map relationships among these complex and largely unknown communities, such as Pallas’ extended network of freedom-seekers. As we conduct further research, these networks will only expand, allowing us to more fully reconstruct and understand the movements, relationships, and livelihoods of enslaved Indigenous people in American history.
Source:
Pallas v. Hill, 12 Va. 149, 2 Hen. & M. 149 (1807), Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia; https://cite.case.law/va/12/149/.
For further reading on Indigenous freedom suits:
Fisher, Linford. “A ‘Spanish Indian Squaw’ in New England: Ann’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom,” in Slave Narratives in French and British North America, eds. Trevor Bernard and Sophie White (Routledge, 2020).
Ray, Kristofer. “‘The Indians of Every Denomination Were Free, and Independent of Us’: Anglo-Virginian Explorations of Indigenous Slavery, Freedom, and Society, 1772–1830.” American Nineteenth Century History 17, no. 2 (May 3, 2016): 139–59.
Sachs, Honor. “‘Freedom By A Judgment’: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family.” Law and History Review 30, no. 1 (February 2012): 173–203.