Suing for Freedom: Interracial Sex, Slave Law, and Racial Identity in the Post-Revolutionary and Antebellum South

Suing for Freedom: Interracial Sex, Slave Law, and Racial Identity in the Post-Revolutionary and Antebellum South

North Carolina Law Review
Volume 82, Issue 2 (January 2004)
pages 535-

Jason A. Gillmer, Associate Professor of Law
Texas Wesleyan School of Law

Introduction

A. Two Stories
 
In 1823 in Sumner County, Tennessee, Phebe, a “colored woman” transplanted from Virginia, brought suit against Abraham Vaughan for her freedom. Phebe alleged that she was being wrongly held in slavery because she descended in the maternal line from an American Indian woman named Murene, her great-grandmother.  Murene, Phebe alleged, was free, and since the rule in Tennessee, as in every Southern state, was that a person’s status as free or slave was determined by the status of the mother, Phebe claimed that she also was free. Phebe thus offered little in the way of her appearance (classed as she was as a woman of color), choosing instead to base her claim on evidence of her descent. Both the trial court and the Tennessee Supreme Court of Errors and Appeals proved solicitous of her efforts, allowing her to rely on hearsay testimony to trace herself back to Murene and, also, to establish that Murene was both an Indian and free.  The Tennessee Supreme Court of Errors and Appeals also upheld the decision to permit Phebe to rely on the record from a case involving her maternal aunt, Tab, against her owner. In that case, Tab successfully sued for her freedom based on the same claim at issue here: that she was free because she descended from Murene.  In the end, the jury awarded Phebe her freedom, with the bulk of the evidentiary rulings upheld on appeal…

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