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freedom suit
Freedom suits were lawsuits filed by enslaved persons against slaveholders asserting their right to freedom.
The right to petition for freedom descended from English common law and allowed people to challenge their enslavement or indenture. Petitioners challenged slavery both directly and indirectly even if slaveholders generally viewed petitions as the exception that proved the rule and as a means to uphold rather than undermine slavery. Slave states, colonies and territories enacted slave laws that created a legal basis for “just subjection.” Their codes also provided for enslaved persons to sue on the basis of wrongful enslavement. While cases were tried during the colonial period, the majority of petitions for freedom were heard during the antebellum period in border or southern states. After the American Revolution, most northern states had abolished slavery, and the United States Congress prohibited it in some newly established territories.
In Saint Louis, Missouri nearly 300 petition cases were filed between 1807 and 1860 and in Washington, D.C. nearly 500 petition cases were filed in the same period. A large portion of cases, as much as one-third, either never went to trial or were settled out of court. In the early nineteenth century in St. Louis and in Washington, D.C., nearly half of the attorneys at the bar may have acted as counsel for slave petitions. Gradually, after the 1830s the number of petition cases declined and the number of attorneys grew. But from 1800 to 1830 most of the bar in these cities tried a petition case.〔(Anne Silverwood Twitty, “Slavery and Freedom on in the American Confluence, from the Northwest Ordinance to Dred Scott,” ) Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2010〕
Recognizing the growing number of manumissions and petition cases being filed in the decades prior to the Civil War, most southern states began to make petitioning more difficult. Maryland, for example, in 1796 required that county courts serve as the court of original jurisdiction, rather than the General Court of the Western Shore, an appellate court. The county courts clearly would be more favorable to the interests and views of local planters against whom these suits were often filed. In Virginia in 1798 the legislature banned those with antislavery sympathies from serving on juries in freedom suits. Maryland did so in 1796. Until the Civil War brought an end to slavery thousands of freedom suits were tried in state courts across the country, with some slaves petitioning as high as the Supreme Court.
==History==
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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