Book Review: Seeking Justice: The Extraordinary Freedom Suits of an Enslaved Virginia Family
Seeking Justice: The Extraordinary Freedom Suits of an Enslaved Virginia Family. By Daniel B. Thorp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025. Softcover, 228 pp., $34.50.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
The means that enslaved people incorporated to resist the oppression of slavery were many. Some ran away, hoping to find freedom in a distant locale. Some bucked the odds and fought back overtly by fomenting rebellions that were ultimately limited in their effect due to the overwhelming power against them by local, state, and federal authorities. Others resisted by subtle daily actions: breaking tools, feigning sickness, mocking enslavers out of hearing distance, and covertly gaining an education.
Another means, albeit largely overlooked, was the court system, as historian Daniel Thorp highlights in his recent book, Seeking Justice: The Extraordinary Freedom Suits of an Enslaved Virginia Family.
Seeking Justice joins other recent publications like A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III (Yale University Press, 2020), and Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South by Kimberly M. Welch (UNC Press, 2020), which both show that enslaved people sometimes attempted to use the law to their advantage. Thorp, however, uses a microhistory approach to the topic, zooming in on one Montgomery County, Virginia enslaved family and their efforts to sue for their emancipation.
Through the extensive use of court documents and deep archival research, Thorp straightens out (as best as possible) a complicated tale of a decades-long lawsuit initiated in 1825 by an enslaved Virginia woman. The suit claimed that she and her relatives were descended from an enslaved New England woman named Flora, who was probably born about 1750. Flora’s complex situation followed a crooked path. When she was about 30, Flora’s enslaver sold her to a new owner, and Flora ran away. Her new enslaver had her arrested, and she ran away again. Recaptured, he took Flora to New York State, probably to avoid the changing slavery laws in Massachusetts at that time and sold her. Her New York owner eventually sold her to a man from Virginia, who brought her and her children to the Old Dominion.
Flora died around 1820, but about five years later her daughter Unis filed a freedom suit in Montgomery County, Virginia, claiming her mother had been illegally enslaved years before in New England. Since the condition of enslaved people followed that of their mother, Unis and her sisters and their many children contended they should all be free.
The idea that enslaved people could initiate a suit for their freedom in a slave state is a fascinating idea on its own, but as Thorp explains: “Freedom suits were a legal process by which Virginia and other slave states sought to balance White residents’ fear of African Americans and their desire to exploit Black labor with their professed commitment to the principles of the American Revolution.” As Thorp further explains, although the enslaved were viewed as property, enslavers knew they were a unique form of property, people. “Thus, they developed a legal system in which freedom was the natural condition of White people, in which only Black people could be legally enslaved, and in which individual Black people might win their freedom if they could demonstrate a legal basis for it.” (13-14)
Additionally, as Thorp and other scholars have argued, White Virginians did not view freedom suits as a threat to the institution. “Rather, they were a means of restoring to a free person rights that had been taken from him or her illegally.” (14) Therefore, in initiating a claim, the plaintiff was actually legitimizing the legality of freedom and slavery.
This did not mean that freedom suits were easy to file. At the end of the 18th century, Virginia changed their enforcement of the laws to reduce frivolous suits. The risk of court costs if one lost their case also often induced caution. But as Thorp states, “enslaved Virginians filed at least 174 freedom suits between the Revolution and the Civil War and won many of them.” (15-16)
Thorp does an excellent job tracking the legal situation of Unis’s suit over the following 30 years as it changed venues numerous times and endured hung juries, presenting yet more obstacles to the plaintiffs in their pursuit of freedom. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that many of the people who were witnesses to Flora’s situation in New England were no longer living in the later stages of the suit. Obtaining depositions from those who could provide them, and of course, the precarious nature and extremely long time to deliver them via that era’s mail system created yet more challenges.
After an 1846 ruling determined that Flora’s descendants should indeed be free, it was appealed on technicalities related to some of the depositions. For Unis and the other descendants a sad final ruling came in 1855 from the Virginia supreme court of appeals that stated “the plaintiffs are slaves.” (141)
Seeking Justice is particularly valuable in that it shows, as Thorp explains: “These were not ignorant, impotent creatures passively waiting for others to determine their fate. They clearly understood the parameters of the world in which they lived, and, within the restrictions imposed on them by the institution of slavery and the laws governing it, they took the initiative in every way they could in an effort to secure their freedom.” (162)
This book is a certainly a welcome addition to the growing historiography on slavery and law. Its contents will be useful to academics in their research, as well as to history enthusiasts eager to learn the many complexities of the peculiar institution and enslaved peoples’ “unquenchable desire . . . to gain their freedom and the determination and ingenuity with which they sought to do so.” (162)
