A Relaxed Approach to Emancipation  in the Frontier Southwest

Harry v. Decker - Mississippi, 1818 (1 Miss. 36); Lunsford v. Coquillon – Louisiana, 1824 (2 Martin N.S. 401)

• Some slaveowners took their slaves with them to free states, either to provide assistance for the trip, to serve the owner while he resided in the north, or to free them.  “Sojourn” cases, presenting the issue of whether such slaves became free when they set foot on Northern soil, came regularly before courts in all parts of the South.

• During the first years of the 19^th century Southern courts, even in the Deep South, liberally held in “sojourn” cases that slaves taken temporarily to free states thereby  became free.  In Harry, Mississippi’s newly-established supreme court held that blacks who had resided in the Midwest before the 1787 Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in the region, were free.  In so doing, Mississippi went further than some Midwestern courts which held that persons who were slaves before the Ordinance took effect remained slaves afterward.  The Mississippi court criticized slavery in terms that would be unthinkable for state lawmakers only a few years later.  Louisiana’s supreme court adopted a similar rule in Lunsford and other early 19^th-century cases, although it carefully refrained from attacking slavery.

Who Is Free, Who A Slave in Louisiana?  The Saga of Adelaide Metayer

Beard v. Poydras – Louisiana, 1816 (4 Martin O.S. 348); Metayer v. Noret – Louisiana, 1818 (5 Martin O.S. 566); Metayer v. Metayer – Louisiana, 1819 (6 Martin O.S. 16)

• Louisiana’s population was as much a hybrid as its legal system.  The new state was home to a unique mix of Americans, Europeans, African slaves, Creoles (persons of mixed race who had been free under French and Spanish rule) and refugees from the revolution-wracked island of Dominica.  Interesting questions arose as to who in this mix was free and who a slave.  
  

• The Poydras and Metayer cases provide two striking examples.  In Poydras, an African claimed his master had verbally freed him during the era of Spanish rule, but he had no papers.  The Partidas allowed verbal emancipation, but the Code Noir required that emancipation be in writing.  The court suggested that the Code had continued in effect for some time after the Spanish took control, but ultimately decided that evidence of verbal emancipation was enough to establish freedom. 

• Adelaide Metayer was born a slave in Haiti in the mid-1700s.  In 1793, France’s revolutionary government decreed that all slaves in Haiti and other French colonies were free.  Adelaide left Haiti in 1803 and lived as a free person in Spanish Cuba until 1809; she then migrated to Louisiana, where her former master’s heirs claimed her as a slave in 1816.  Adelaide’s first freedom suit failed, although  Louisiana’s supreme court agreed that under Spanish law she would have been free if her master’s heirs had waited 20 years (until 1823) to claim her.  Adelaide did not give up:  she filed another lawsuit, arguing that the French government had freed her in 1793, and this time she prevailed. 

• Adelaide Metayer’s story is little known today, but she deserves a place in the pantheon of early fighters for black freedom.