A Free Family of Color Sues to Retain Their Freedom in Virginia in 1820

[Slavery]: [West Virginia]: [Virginia]: [Caesar Freeman]:

[Collection of Manuscript Legal Documents Involving a Monumental Court Case in Which Caesar Freeman, a Manumitted Slave, and His Family Sued to Re-Establish Their Long-Held Freedom in Early-19th-Century Virginia].

[Virginia and Alabama: 1819-1820]. Eight manuscript documents, totaling sixteen pages. Typical mailing folds and handling wear. Very good. Item #12624

Manuscript records from an extraordinary court case in modern-day West Virginia, in which a free person of color named Caesar Freeman (also known as Ceasar, Cesar, or Black Cesar) and his family defended themselves and then sued to re-establish their own freedom over twenty years after being manumitted by their owner, who had attempted to use them as collateral for a loan after their manumission. The case took place in Greenbrier and Pocahontas counties in West Virginia. Pocahontas County is located on the Virginia-West Virginia border, and at the time of these documents was located in Virginia; Greenbrier County is a bit further west. A few of these documents emanate from or relate to Franklin County, Alabama, where one of the deponents had moved by the time of the legal proceedings.

The case is detailed in a small pamphlet entitled, Ceasar Mountain: Slavery and Freedom in Western Virginia by John Cohassey, published in 2016. The opening paragraphs of said pamphlet provide excellent background on the case: “In Pocahontas County, West Virginia, lore tells of an 18th century legal feud between landowners George Massingbird and Thomas McCarty. In 1796 Massingbird secured a loan from McCarty. Thirty-two days after entering the contract and in need of collateral, Massingbird claimed that his freed slaves – Cesar and family – were still his property. Nearly two decades later Massingbird remained indebted to McCarty, who, demanding final payment, sought ownership of the Ceasar Freeman family. From the outset of this financial arrangement, the Freemans served as collateral for a loan that Massingbird had intended to pay without likely expecting that the transaction would jeopardize the family’s freedom. When legally threatened to make the final payment, Massingbird stated (truthfully) in a deposition that he had freed Caesar and family after the date of his initial loan. A Virginia statute stipulated that any slave manumitted after the date of a contract was not subject to reenslavement. But at this point, Massingbird’s motivation for changing his story likely had more to do with his preventing McCarty‘s claim over the Freemans than to settle a debt that threatened him with serious legal consequences. Without money to pay McCarty upon the deadline of the debt, Massingbird changed his story once again – that Cesar and family had not been freed after the contract. This (untruthful) claim, as in the initial loan, now placed the burden on the Freemans to prove their status as free persons of color. Assisted financially by local whites, Ceasar and family won their case. Learning that Massingbird had on two occasions claimed them as collateral, the Freemans sued both Massingbird and McCarty. Victorious in court, the Freemans were awarded land in a region, where they once were slaves – while the name of a nearby mountain was reputedly taken from their respected patriarch.” The mountain referred to here is known as Caesar Mountain in Pocahontas County.

The present documents emanate from the case in 1819-20.  Two of the earliest documents, dated in October and November 1819, relate to McCarty’s suit against Massingbird, and mainly pertain to making sure Caesar and his family remain in the state. This included the jailing of Caesar and Sarah’s daughter Nancy Ware, whom Massingbird apparently still claimed as a slave. One chief aspect of the importance of these documents lies in the fact that Caesar and his entire family are listed by name, as such: “Caesar, Sarah his wife, Nancy, Adam, Zachariah, John, Esther, Jim, Sally, Abraham, Elizabeth, Martha & Rebecca, Children of Caesar and Sarah who are persons of colour.” Also of particular interest is that one of the documents appears to be signed by both Caesar and his daughter Nancy with their marks, the day after Nancy was released from jail.

In the remaining six documents, Caesar and his family (as well as defendant McCarty) work through the Virginia and Alabama courts to secure a deposition from James J. Mayers, a trustee of the Massingbird-McCarty agreement which supposedly still held the Freeman family in bondage. These documents are dated between July 1819 and February 1820. The earliest of these documents is a summons for Massingbird, McCarty, and Mayers to appear in Greenbrier County court “to answer a bill exhibited against them by Caesar and Sarah his wife as well as their adult children…who are permitted to sue in forma pauperis.” This is an extraordinary document, encapsulating the right of free persons of color to sue their former owners and others in court in Virginia in 1819, and representing the Freemans’ fight for their continued freedom.  The next document, dated October 29, 1819, contains testimony from George Massingbird confirming that “the Petitioners [the Freemans] were emancipated by your respondent [Massingbird] prior to the contract made by your respondent with his codefendant McCarty….” Finally, the truth from Massingbird. In the third document, dated the same day, the trustee James Mayers asks to be dismissed from the case, agreeing to all that was said by Massingbird in court.

This was not enough for the courts, or perhaps for one of the defendants, Thomas McCarty. The final three documents, dated between February and April 1820, further pertain to securing testimony from Mayers in the case. On February 21, 1820, Virginia clerk John A. North addresses a one-page partially-printed form, completed in manuscript, to “any two Justices of the Peace for Franklin County, State of Alabama.” The document was sent “on behalf of Thomas McCarty Defendant as of Caesar & other persons of colour Plaintiffs who are permitted to sue in forma pauperis.” The intentionof the document was to seek the help of Alabama officials in “examining whatever witnesses” they might have in the case. The next document is dated two days later, and sent from McCarty to Caesar. Here, McCarty informs “Black Caesar” that he intends to depose Mayers in Alabama on April 24, and that the deposition shall “bee red as evidence in the Chancery Court in a suit where you are plaintiff and myself and others are defendants.” Again, a rare instance in which a white defendant writes to a Black plaintiff in the antebellum South, involving the freedom of the latter.

The final document, chock full of detail on four folio pages, contains the substance of Mayers’ deposition, indeed given on April 24, 1820. Here, Mayers discloses all he knows of Massingbird’s contrary claims involving the case, including the fact that Massingbird told him two contradictory stories about the Freeman’s manumission. Mayers professes that after Massingbird told him the whole truth of the matter, he was “no little surprized at this declaration after what had taken place when application was made to draw the trust deed.” Sadly, these four pages constitute the majority of Mayers’ testimony, but seem to end mid-sentence, leaving the remainder of his testimony to the vagaries of time. Still, the most important part of the story is told here: Massingbird emancipated Caesar and then lied about it when he couldn’t pay his debts, endangering the freedom of an entire family in the interest of cold, hard cash.

According to Cohassey’s 2016 pamphlet, this testimony was “read aloud in court” and “no doubt revealed Massingbird’s duplicity in the matter.” Eventually, Caesar and his family won the court case. Afterwards, Massingbird deeded over 400 acres of land in Pocahontas County to the Freemans, which apparently included Caesar Mountain. The Freemans lived out their remaining years as free people, recorded in local tax lists between 1825 and 1843.

Price: $9,500