Enslavement

On June 30, 1819, Betsey submitted a petition to the Orleans Parish Court wherein she identified herself as “Betsey otherwise called Rachel.” The reasons why Betsey had to acknowledge that she was also “called Rachel” were at the center of her lawsuit. According to Betsey, she was “born free” in Cincinnati, Ohio, had lived “as a free person” in states including Ohio and Tennessee, and “never was sold or claimed as a slave until she was sold, first by one Erwin to Nathaniel Cannon and subsequently by Cannon to Pierre St. Amant,” a resident of New Orleans, who now claimed Betsey as his enslaved property. Betsey, via her attorney William Orr, asked the court for three things: first, to order St. Amand to release her “from her illegal and unjust slavery”; second, to instruct St. Amand to “pay her all reasonable damages for her illegal detention”; and finally, to have the Orleans Parish Sheriff hire her out so that she could work for wages until the lawsuit was resolved.3

Throughout the antebellum period, enslaved people in Louisiana were not allowed to “be party in any civil action” save for instances when an enslaved individual had “claim to prove his freedom.” 4 While I have yet to encounter a freedom suit in which an enslaved person suing for freedom testified on his or her own behalf, that is not to say that enslaved plaintiffs had nothing to say or offer in support of their claims. While Betsey’s attorney surely wrote her petition, he would have had no idea what story to tell without Betsey’s knowledge of her past. Petitions in these disputes were thus spaces for enslaved people, via their attorneys, to explain how they had become enslaved and to begin to demonstrate that they were entitled to their freedom. Of course, not every plaintiff told the same story.

In her August 1827 petition, Sarah Nicholson identified herself as a 24-year-old woman, born in Delaware to free parents. A year earlier, Nicholson’s attorney explained, she was “stolen away from Pine Street wharf” in Philadelphia, taken aboard a brig, restrained with ropes, and taken southward to Louisiana, where she was sold as a slave.5 In November 1835, Marian Tait sued the mayor, alderman, and inhabitants of the City of New Orleans for her freedom. Despite being born to free parents in South Carolina, Tait was arrested and imprisoned as a runaway slave.6 When enslaved individuals argued that they were free, whether because of their place of birth or the contents of a will, the reasons for their enslavement remained much the same: as recognizably Black individuals, they were enslaved because it was possible for others to identify and treat them as slaves.

The petition that Betsey filed in June 1819 as well as the words of those who testified on her behalf provide some insight into her past and the circumstances surrounding her enslavement—or, rather, the version of the past that Betsey and her attorney believed would convince the court that she was entitled to her freedom. Betsey was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, likely in the late 1790s or early 1800s. Her mother was a free woman. They lived in Ohio when Betsey was a child, moving between Cincinnati and Mad River. Later, Betsey also spent time in Nashville, Tennessee, with her brother Bole, who owned a public house. In 1814, but possibly earlier, she worked as a cook on board barges as well as in several homes in Baton Rouge. During her travels, Betsey became acquainted with residents of Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Natchez, Mississippi, some of whom would testify on her behalf, providing evidence that suggests Betsey was who she claimed to be.

On April 29, 1819, a white man by the name of Joseph Erwin filed a lawsuit that would change the course of Betsey’s life. In his petition to the First Judicial District Court of Louisiana, Erwin via his attorney explained that he had previously sold John Hutchinson and Samuel Downey nine enslaved people—Patrick, Lawrence, Roger, Sam, Baptiste, Charles, Lizzy, Rachel, and Tabby—in Iberville Parish, Louisiana. Although Hutchinson and Downey had mortgaged these enslaved people to Erwin for the sum of $7,200, an outstanding debt of $800, which Hutchinson and Downey “neglected and refused to pay,” remained. Additionally, Erwin noted, one of the enslaved people whom Hutchinson and Downey purchased, Rachel, was “now within the jurisdiction of this honorable court.” While Erwin did not elaborate on Rachel or her location, he did request “an order of seizure . . . against the said slave Rachel and that she be sold by the Sheriff to satisfy the balance due.” On May 6, 1819, Judge Joshua Lewis responded by instructing the Orleans Parish Sheriff to “seize and sell according to law, a colored negroe woman named Rachel.”7

Rachel was not in John Hutchinson’s or Samuel Downey’s possession when Judge Lewis issued his order. Joseph Erwin told Cage—the man he hired to arrest Rachel—that he believed she was dead, and it is possible that she was. As all we have to learn about Rachel’s life comes from contracts and mortgage agreements, documents that the men who created them swore described Betsey, we have no way of knowing where Rachel was when Cage arrested Betsey. It stands to reason, however, that Rachel was not in Hutchinson’s or Downey’s possession when Judge Lewis issued his order. To ensure he got his money back, Erwin identified Betsey as Rachel and hired Cage to arrest her “as a run away.” There is no record of what this arrest looked like from Betsey’s perspective; only Cage’s remains. According to Cage, he approached Betsey in New Orleans’s Faubourg St. Mary neighborhood, informing her that he was hired by Captain Erwin to “take her up as a runaway.” She responded to the name Rachel, Cage claimed, explaining that she did not belong to Erwin but that he had sold her to Hutchinson and Downey, and she was now the property of someone named Mr. More who lived in the upper Faubourg. Cage then arrested Betsey and “lodged her in jail as a runaway” named Rachel.

I do not know how or why Joseph Erwin chose Betsey. In all likelihood, Betsey was also in the dark. As someone had previously stolen Betsey’s freedom papers some years earlier, she was especially vulnerable, but I am unsure how and whether Erwin could have known this bit of information. Perhaps Erwin saw a stranger and took a chance? Maybe he thought Betsey looked like a traveler with no kin or community in close proximity who could help her demonstrate that she was free? Did he suspect she was a runaway herself? Whatever Erwin’s reasons, he saw Betsey as someone whom he could claim as Rachel, and, to a large extent, he had the law on his side.

On June 7, 1806, the Territory of Orleans’s legislature passed “an Act prescribing the rules and conduct to be observed with respect to Negroes and other Slaves of this territory,” more commonly known as the Black Code, which remained in effect throughout the antebellum period. According to historian Judith Kelleher Schafer, the code’s “main purpose” was the “regulation and control of the area’s burgeoning slave population.”8 The code included specific regulations pertaining to the capture and exploitation of those deemed runaway slaves. According to section 32, if an enslaved person was found “absent from a house or dwelling, or where his usual place of working or residence is, without a white person accompanying him, and shall refuse to submit to the examination of any freeholder, the said freeholder shall be permitted to seize and correct the said slave.” Section 27 provided free and enslaved people with a monetary incentive to arrest runaway enslaved people, stating that “the keeper of the jail of the county where a runaway may be caught, shall pay in cash or by giving his bond for every runaway slave delivered into his hands, to the person or persons, whether free or slave, who may have caught said runaway.” According to section 28, those arrested and confined to the jail in New Orleans could be “directed by the sheriffs of the respective counties, to hard labor.” During that time, the city council and sheriffs were supposed to “advertise said slaves at least in two newspapers of said city, in French and English,” for three consecutive months, “and after that term once a month during the remainder of the year.” And if an enslaved person was not claimed within two years of the first published advertisement, reads section 29, it was the city treasurer’s responsibility “to cause the said negroes to be sold.” The proceeds of these sales, which took place at public auction, would then be used first to compensate the jailers and sheriffs who had imprisoned the enslaved person in question, and the remaining funds would be “deposited into the hands of the treasurer of the territory.”9

Louisiana’s laws thus outlined a process through which people of color were surveilled, arrested, and imprisoned as runaway slaves. Court records from other freedom suits demonstrate the pivotal role that arrests and local jails played in transforming free individuals into slaves. Of the 61 freedom suits tried before the Orleans Parish Court between 1813 and 1846, 32 include mentions of local New Orleans jails. Twenty-two of the plaintiffs in these 32 disputes describe being arrested, most as runaway slaves. Rachel, who sued for her freedom in the Orleans Parish Court in May 1820, explained in her petition that despite being “duly emancipated by a public act,” a man by the name of Simon Knight “falsely and maliciously advertised your petitioner in the newspapers of this city as a runaway.” Knight then brought Rachel to the jail “as his runaway slave and there as such forcibly and against her will detains and imprisons her although well knowing of her freedom.”10 In her 1834 petition to the Orleans Parish Court, Louisa Davis recounted how George Shall brought her “by force” to the police jail, where he “entered her on the books of said jail as her slave and ordered her to receive twenty five lashes, on a ladder which cruel treatment was accordingly instituted in the severest manner. And then the said George Shall,” her petition continued, “ordered the jailor to put her in the streets to work with the chain negroes.”11

When it came to enslaving free people of color, enslavers thus relied on their ability to identify and arrest individuals as runaway enslaved people. In the process, they created written records wherein they identified specific people as enslaved and sometimes assigned these imprisoned individuals different names. Peter, a free man of color, was arrested in September 1817 “under the name of Ben by a certain Mr. Haviland under a pretense that your petitioner was a slave of Mr. John Hutchins of Natchez.”12 Jean Baptiste Camille arrested Marie Joseph Meyon and “lodged [her] in the police jail of the Parish as his slave under the name of Lysida.”13 In his petition to the Orleans Parish Court, Mathias Gilbert recounted how he was detained by two persons who “charged him with being a runaway slave” and fixed “a false name upon him.”14 In assigning a free person a different name, enslavers continued the process of transforming free individuals into slaves, using jailkeepers’ records to help them do so.

Arrests helped make Betsey’s enslavement possible. Holland, a man working for Orleans Parish as either a jailer or a sheriff’s deputy, testified that he recognized Betsey when she was brought to the jail, presumably by Cage. In 1816, just three years earlier, Betsey was arrested and imprisoned “as a free woman” on a charge of larceny. Though she was “discharged without prosecution,” Holland explained, her time in jail yielded devastating effects. According to Mr. McFarland, another witness who may have also been employed by Orleans Parish, Betsey showed him her freedom papers while she was imprisoned as well as asked him to write a letter to someone whose name he could not recall. Later, Betsey accused some women who were imprisoned alongside her of stealing her freedom papers, raising such a disturbance that she was flogged into silence. Despite her best efforts to retrieve her papers, Betsey never got them back.15 When Cage approached her and called her Rachel, she had no means of demonstrating that she was not Rachel. However, even if she had had her papers when Cage approached her, the same result was possible and even likely. Possession of one’s freedom papers did not guarantee freedom. Still, losing her papers must have filled Betsey with terror, and I suspect that she may have hoped that whoever she was attempting to contact from jail might help her secure documentation of her status.

When Joseph Erwin ordered Cage to arrest and imprison Betsey as a runaway slave, he had not simply convinced Cage that Betsey was an enslaved woman named Rachel but had also effectively ensured that the state recognized her as such. By imprisoning Betsey, Erwin created a legitimate archival record of her status as enslaved property. He was able to do so, first, because Betsey was a woman of color, whom Erwin recognized and whom he knew others could recognize as a commodity, without a means of immediately demonstrating that she was a free woman; and second, because the law provided him with the power to imprison her as a slave. Betsey knew she was free when Cage approached and accused her of being an enslaved woman named Rachel, but what she knew about herself and her past was of no legal consequence. She did not possess and could not create any documentary evidence that could compel others to recognize her freedom, making her status, however rooted in reality, unverifiable. Betsey was a free woman in a place where others could identify her as a slave at their discretion and, by committing her to jail, could also create evidence of her status as enslaved property. By allowing residents to interrogate, seize, and arrest those they believed were runaway slaves, the state of Louisiana thus helped facilitate the enslavement of free people of color such as Betsey.

In the span of two weeks, Betsey was captured, imprisoned, and sold twice, making for a swift, terrifying transition from freedom to enslavement. On May 15, 1819, Holland delivered Betsey to Joseph Erwin. Then, three days later, on May 18, Erwin sold Betsey to Nathaniel R. Cannon, who then sold her to Pierre St. Amand. Any attempts she made to convince these men that she was Betsey, not Rachel, would likely have been met with threats and violent reprisals. Mathias Gilbert, who was also arrested as a runaway slave under a false name, would later describe the circumstances surrounding his arrest and subsequent sale in his petition to the Orleans Parish Court. As the unnamed men who captured and transported him to Baltimore tried to sell him, Gilbert repeatedly deterred many potential buyers from purchasing him “by his asserting that he was a freeman and relating to them his History.” But asserting his freedom came at a heavy price. Gilbert was “cruelly and grievously punished” until, “intimidated by the severity of the punishment inflicted upon him and dreading a repetition of them,” Gilbert thought it better “to be silent on the subject of his wrongs and in future not to deny that he was a slave.”16 Perhaps Betsey was also tortured or at the very least threatened into silence.

Somehow, likely from jail, Betsey was able to contact attorney William Orr and hire him to file a freedom suit on her behalf. To demonstrate that she was entitled to her freedom, Betsey would need to gather evidence and solicit testimony to tell a story she knew intimately well but could never prove on her own. In court, her freedom depended on her ability to present a well-evidenced historical narrative that was more compelling than her owner’s, and she was at a tremendous disadvantage. Taking a closer look at the narratives that Betsey, Pierre St. Amand, and their respective attorneys worked to construct can help us make sense of how St. Amand was able to use written records to transform Betsey into Rachel.

The Plaintiff

In her petition to the Orleans Parish Court, Betsey claimed that she was entitled to her freedom because she was “born free” in Cincinnati, Ohio. To support her claim, Betsey and her attorney needed to construct a compelling historical narrative that began at the moment of her birth. Betsey was 1 of 20 plaintiffs in freedom suits tried before the Orleans Parish Court who claimed they were born free.17 Records from 7 of these disputes do not include a verdict; they may have been dismissed at the time, but it is also possible that the pages that referenced the court’s decision have since been misplaced. Of the remaining 13 freedom suits, plaintiffs in 7 cases successfully secured their freedom, and 6 cases were either dismissed or decided in favor of the defendant. By examining the cases these enslaved plaintiffs worked to build, we can begin to make sense of not only why Betsey was unable to convince the Orleans Parish Court that she was free but also the obstacles that enslaved individuals encountered when they sued for their freedom.

Betsey depended on eight people, seven white men and one white woman, to testify on her behalf. Each of these witnesses claimed they recognized her as a free woman of color named Betsey, not an enslaved woman named Rachel. Mrs. Winyard, whose first name was not included in court records, corroborated Betsey’s claim that she had previously lived in Cincinnati. On March 24, 1820, Mrs. Winyard testified that she met Betsey, whom she had never known “by any other name than Betsey Johnson,” 16 or 17 years earlier, in either 1803 or 1804. At the time, Betsey was four or five years of age and living in Cincinnati with her siblings and her mother who, according to Mrs. Winyard, “always passed as a free woman.” Since then, Betsey and Mrs. Winyard had become reacquainted in New Orleans, where they lived “next door” to one another for at least two years leading up to Mrs. Winyard’s testimony. Mrs. Winyard also testified that Betsey had a half sister by the name of Rachel who also passed as a free woman in New Orleans. But for all the information Mrs. Winyard was able to recall regarding Betsey, her family, and her life in Cincinnati and New Orleans, she was unable to corroborate Betsey’s claims regarding her place of birth, testifying that she “doth not know that Betsey was born in Cincinnati” because Betsey was already four years old when they met.

Enslaved plaintiffs who claimed they were entitled to their freedom because of where and to whom they were born worked to gather the evidence and secure the testimony necessary to construct a historical narrative that began with their birth. Jesse Britain, who sued for his freedom in the Orleans Parish Court on September 14, 1818, claimed he was entitled to his freedom because he was born to a free woman of color in Fairfax County, Virginia. Britain did not offer any documentary evidence to support his claim, but he was able to secure two witnesses who were familiar with the circumstances surrounding his birth. On October 1, 1818, John Clain, a 23-year-old white man, testified on Britain’s behalf. Clain stated that “he and plaintiff were born in [the] same neighborhood in Fairfax County Virginia, within half a mile of each other.” He was also acquainted with Britain’s mother, Venus, a “free woman [who] lived to herself and cultivated a piece of ground” and owned “cows and horses” in Virginia. Jesse Britain and John Clain remained friends and neighbors until Clain and his family moved to Kentucky, and they became reacquainted when living in New Orleans in 1817. David Williams, a free man of color, also testified on Britain’s behalf. Williams claimed he “knew [the] plaintiff more than ten years ago in Fairfax County,” where Britain attended school, receiving a “tolerable education.” Williams was also acquainted with Jesse Britain’s father, Ben Williams, and his mother, Venus, both of whom he “always knew” as free individuals.18 On March 9, 1820, the Orleans Parish Court ruled in Jesse Britain’s favor.

Whereas the two witnesses who testified on Jesse Britain’s behalf were able to disclose specific details about Britain’s parents that demonstrated they were free individuals—such as their ability to own property and send their child to school—Betsey was unable to locate any witnesses who possessed similar information about her past. Mrs. Winyard was not able to confirm that Betsey was born in Cincinnati, nor could she recall much information about Betsey’s mother. But that is not to say that Betsey’s claims about herself and her past were not rooted in reality. What Betsey was able to prove in court was a matter of what evidence she was able to secure and which individuals she was able to contact in a timely manner. Successfully reconstructing the past did not depend on a plaintiff’s or defendant’s accurate historical knowledge; it depended on who had the means to create and corroborate a historical narrative. While Jesse Britain had the good fortune of living in close proximity to two individuals who were both well acquainted with his history and willing to disclose it under oath, Betsey probably had no such network to fall back on. The outcome of these two lawsuits did not differ because Jesse Britain’s narrative was more truthful than Betsey’s; they differed because Betsey did not have access to evidence or a network of individuals who could and would verify her past.

Not unlike Mrs. Winyard, the remaining seven witnesses who testified on Betsey’s behalf did not divulge any information about her place of birth. Their testimony does, however, provide us with a clearer picture of Betsey’s life leading up to her arrest. Isaac Dorris, a white man who testified on March 24, 1820, claimed that he first became acquainted with Betsey 13 or 14 years earlier in Nashville, Tennessee, and had “never heard anything about the plaintiff’s freedom nor did he ever hear she was claimed by any one as a slave.” During his deposition, Dorris recalled that Betsey had a brother in Nashville by the name of Bole, who ran a “public house.” He also happened to be acquainted with Joseph Erwin, who he did not believe “ever claimed the plaintiff as a slave.” Dorris became reacquainted with Betsey in the previous three years while living in New Orleans, where “she passed” as a “free girl since he knew her to the best of his knowledge.” When Dorris was asked whether he recognized the plaintiff as the same woman he described in his testimony, he answered that he believed she was “the same woman he knew at Nashville, and has no doubt of it at all.”

William Davis, a white man and a planter who lived several miles south of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, also testified on Betsey’s behalf. Davis first became acquainted with Betsey in either 1812 or 1813 in Natchez, Mississippi. He claimed that the plaintiff “went by the name of free Betsey” and that he had never heard she was “claimed by any one as a slave.” Andrew Bird and William Bird, both of whom were deposed on Betsey’s behalf in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, claimed that they knew the plaintiff as a free woman of color with whom they had become acquainted in 1814. According to Andrew Bird, Betsey was not a slave; she was a free woman of color who worked on board a barge as a cook and who “passed as such in Baton Rouge without ever being interrupted on that account.” William Bird confirmed that Betsey “was never molested by anybody” in regard to her freedom, which he acknowledged after “he made inquiries from several persons, who told him that she was free.”

Isaac Dorris recognized Betsey as a free woman because of her reputation in Nashville and because he also recognized her brother Bole as a free man. William Davis decided that Betsey was a free woman when he heard others call her by the name “free Betsey.” Andrew Bird determined that Betsey was a free woman because he never witnessed another person accuse Betsey of being a slave. William Bird determined that Betsey was free only after making “inquiries from several persons, who told him that she was free.” None of the aforementioned witnesses testified that they ever asked Betsey whether she was free or enslaved or that they requested that she show them her freedom papers, suggesting that Betsey’s status as a free woman depended on the recognition of others in most every space and not always on written evidence—that is, until it did. Betsey relied on others’ willingness to distinguish between a woman of color who was enslaved and a woman of color who was free. And it was men such as Isaac Dorris and William Davis who made decisions about what was acceptable evidence of Betsey’s freedom, not Betsey. Here lies the root of the tenuous circumstances of Betsey’s freedom: that it was potentially subject to scrutiny at every moment and that it could always require different, unpredictable standards of verification. Even beyond the space of a courtroom and the context of a freedom suit, Betsey could discover that her knowledge of her past and the reasons she was entitled to her freedom were painfully insufficient evidence of her status as a free woman.

The Defendant

As a defendant in a freedom suit, Pierre St. Amand was interested in protecting his investment in the plaintiff, regardless of the court’s decision. He did not need to personally have much information about Rachel’s or Betsey’s past in order to do so, as he was able to rely on the state to gather the documentary evidence and secure the witnesses necessary to build his case. St. Amand submitted four documents to the Orleans Parish Court as evidence. Document A was a certificate of mortgages, Document B was a notarial contract wherein the parties involved in a mortgage agreed to dissolve it, Document C was a private bill of sale, and Document D was a notarial contract. St. Amand himself neither possessed any of the documentary evidence he submitted nor was previously acquainted with any of the witnesses who testified on his behalf. The evidence and networks he relied on to create the history of transactions and mortgages necessary to make Betsey into Rachel were created and maintained by enslavers in conjunction with the state of Louisiana. Examining the case that Pierre St. Amand and his allies built and considering how he was able to build it reveal how defendants in freedom suits could rely on their privileged relationship with the state not only to build cases during freedom suits but also to avoid losing their investments regardless of a court’s decision.

On March 27, 1820, Pierre St. Amand submitted a copy of a notarial contract that included the terms of his purchase of an enslaved woman named Rachel from Nathaniel R. Cannon. The contract, which he and Cannon signed before New Orleans notary Phillippe Pendesclaux on May 22, 1819, was one that the state of Louisiana had acknowledged and archived. St. Amand was thus able to rely on the state to secure evidence that proved not only that he had purchased the plaintiff as an enslaved woman but also that the state had recognized her as a person who could be sold. The contract also established that Nathaniel R. Cannon had sold the plaintiff to St. Amand, which allowed St. Amand to call Cannon into court as a defendant to effectively support his claim to Rachel.

Because slave buyers and sellers in Louisiana were supposed to document their transactions in writing and register their contracts with the state, plaintiffs and defendants involved in civil suits concerning enslaved people could often rely on the state when it came to gathering the documentary evidence necessary to support their claims. When Pierre St. Amand responded to Betsey’s lawsuit, he did not submit the original contract that he and Nathaniel R. Cannon signed before New Orleans notary Philippe Pendesclaux. Instead, he had Pendesclaux transcribe and submit a copy of the contract to the Orleans Parish Court. Below the transcription, Pendesclaux wrote the following: “I do hereby certify the above to be a true copy of the original on Record in my office in witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal.” Because St. Amand purchased Betsey using an authentic act of sale, he could rely on the state’s archive to secure evidence when his right to possess his newly acquired enslaved property was challenged. The authentic act of sale was proof of the obligations between St. Amand and Cannon, and in the context of a freedom suit, St. Amand could use it as evidence to demonstrate that both he and the state had recognized the plaintiff as a person who could be sold and owned.

The contract that Pierre St. Amand used to purchase Betsey was also evidence that he could use to transform Nathaniel Cannon into a defendant. It was in Cannon’s interest to disclose information, seek out evidence, and locate witnesses who would allow St. Amand to maintain possession of the plaintiff, if only to avoid having to reimburse St. Amand himself. Indeed, the fact that St. Amand and Cannon appeared in court to respond to Betsey’s lawsuit on the same day and with the same attorney, G. Wikoff, suggests that their interests were very much aligned. In addition to submitting a copy of the notarial contract as evidence, the defense also presented several documents relating to a sale and mortgage agreement between Joseph Erwin, John Hutchinson, and Samuel Downey. Once more, St. Amand and Cannon were able to secure these documents because the state of Louisiana preserved them.

Louisiana’s 1808 Civil Code defined a mortgage as “a contract by which a person affects the whole of his property or only some part of it, in favor of another, for security of an engagement, but without divesting himself of the possession thereof.”19 The 1825 Civil Code refined the definition, but in spirit it remained much the same.20 Mortgages were further divided into conventional, legal, and judicial mortgages.21 Conventional mortgages reflected an agreement between several parties; judicial mortgages were the result of a court’s judgment; and a legal mortgage was an agreement created by the law alone.22 Throughout the antebellum period, conventional mortgages were valid only if they were documented under private signature or in an authentic act.23 Thus, when John Hutchinson and Samuel Downey mortgaged nine enslaved people, including Rachel, to Joseph Erwin for $7,200 on February 2, 1813, they were supposed to put the terms of their agreement in writing, either privately or before a Louisiana notary.

Although parties who entered into a conventional mortgage were allowed to record their agreement in a private act, they were also supposed to register their agreement with the state in order for the obligations outlined therein to be valid against a third party.24 The 1808 Civil Code required consenting parties to register conventional mortgages in New Orleans in a “public folio book kept for that purpose in the city of New-Orleans for the whole territory.”25 As of 1825, parties were (on paper) allowed to register their agreements with parish judges outside of New Orleans, but the city still maintained the office of the recorder of mortgages, who was responsible for maintaining several registers, including one that contained “all acts from which there results a conventional or legal mortgage, or privilege.”26 Throughout the antebellum period, these officers were bound to deliver a “certificate of the mortgages” to any individual who requested information regarding a specific piece of property, including enslaved property.27

On February 2, 1813, Joseph Erwin, John Hutchinson, and Samuel Downey appeared before Iberville Parish judge John Dutton. Dutton and Downey purchased and agreed to mortgage nine enslaved people to Erwin for $7,200. Seven years later, Pierre St. Amand’s and Nathaniel R. Cannon’s attorney, G. Wikoff, requested and received a certificate of mortgages from New Orleans’s recorder of mortgages, a document he subsequently presented as evidence to the Orleans Parish Court. The certificate, dated March 18, 1820, confirmed that Hutchinson and Downey had mortgaged nine enslaved people, including an enslaved woman named Rachel, “in favor of” Erwin “to secure the payment of seven thousand two hundred Dollars.”28 By obtaining the certificate, Wikoff effectively bolstered Pierre St. Amand and Nathaniel Cannon’s claims that the plaintiff was an enslaved woman named Rachel.

St. Amand also submitted a private bill of sale as evidence. The contract was penned by Joseph Erwin, and it bore Erwin’s signature as well as the signature of N. Wilson, a person who witnessed the transaction. It stated that on May 18, 1819, Erwin “sold and delivered” a “negro woman named Rachel” to Nathaniel Cannon for $800. Once again, this was not a document that St. Amand had in his possession; in all likelihood, it was Cannon who provided the aforementioned document, as it confirmed that he had purchased an enslaved woman named Rachel from Joseph Erwin. Three days after Betsey filed her lawsuit in the Orleans Parish Court, St. Amand and his attorney, G. Wikoff, submitted their response to the court. St. Amand maintained that he was the “true and legal owner of the negress Betsey alias Rachel,” who he accused of claiming “the right of freedom without any maintainable ground or reason.” He then asked the court to instruct Nathaniel R. Cannon to appear in order to “guarantee your respondent against all damages which he may sustain in this suit and to confirm his right titles in said negress.” Paper made it possible for St. Amand to gain an ally in his endeavor to demonstrate that the plaintiff was a slave named Rachel.

St. Amand’s request that Cannon appear in court was similar to a defendant in a slave-centered redhibition suit asking that a previous owner be called to court as a means of avoiding being held liable if the court issued a verdict in favor of the plaintiff. By calling on Cannon, St. Amand had effectively ensured that his investment in Betsey was secure regardless of the Orleans Parish Court’s decision. For instance, when Sarah Nicholson sued Edward Livingston Thompson for her freedom in the Orleans Parish Court in August 1827, Livingston responded by requesting that Pressley Stephenson, from whom he purchased Nicholson, “be cited in warranty according to law to come in and defend this suit.” He also asked that if the plaintiff “should succeed in obtaining her freedom, the said Stephenson shall be decreed to pay your respondent back the amount of purchase,” approximately $325. When the Orleans Parish Court ruled in Sarah Nicholson’s favor, the judge included the following in his written decision: “And whereas the said Defendant did call in warrantee this vendor Pressley Stephenson as per authentic deed of sale annexed to his answer, it is further ordered and decreed that the Defendant shall have his recourse against him for the reimbursement of the price being 325 dollars together with the amount of costs and compensations allowed as aforesaid by the court.”29 For enslavers, acts of sale were thus sometimes worth producing, if only to ensure that one’s investment remained as secure as possible.

Joseph Thompson, Abraham Wright, Samuel M. Spraggins, and Cage each testified on behalf of the defendant in Betsey alias Rachel v. St. Amand (1819). Thompson and Wright were in Joseph Erwin’s employ as early as 1806 and 1807, and Wright and Spraggins were in the slave trading and real estate business with Erwin. Alice Pemble White, whose master’s thesis centered the experiences of Joseph Erwin and his wife, Lavinia Erwin, in Louisiana, described Abraham Wright as “Erwin’s loyal and trusted agent.”30 And Cage was working for Erwin when he arrested Betsey in May 1819. The notarial contract that Pierre St. Amand and Nathaniel Cannon signed on May 22, 1819, contained no mention of Joseph Erwin, and if Cannon had been inclined to withhold information about his purchase from St. Amand, it would have proven difficult for St. Amand to locate any of these witnesses, because he would have had no idea where to look. But because Cannon was invested in the outcome of the lawsuit, if only to avoid having to reimburse St. Amand, Cannon was likely able to contact the aforementioned witnesses through Joseph Erwin.

Each of these witnesses was essential to Pierre St. Amand’s and Nathaniel Cannon’s defense. Of the four who testified on St. Amand’s behalf, only Cage was deposed in the presence of the plaintiff and defendant. Samuel Spraggins was deposed before a justice of the peace in New Orleans, and Joseph Thompson and Abraham Wright testified before a justice of the peace in Iberville Parish. Each of them claimed that they believed that the plaintiff was Rachel, an enslaved woman or, in Cage’s case, that he recognized the plaintiff in court as Rachel. While a defendant’s ability to present written evidence mattered, it was not always, in itself, sufficient proof that a plaintiff should be enslaved. In addition to documentary evidence that proved that the plaintiff had been treated as a slave, defendants in freedom suits depended on witnesses to confirm that the person described in the contents of a contract or a mortgage certificate was the plaintiff.

For instance, on July 14, 1831, Venus Davenport filed a freedom suit in the Orleans Parish Court. In her petition, Venus explained that she was previously enslaved but was freed when John Stanley, her owner, took her to Illinois, where slavery “was prohibited by law.” She claimed that she “became free” because for at least 21 years, she resided in Illinois with Stanley’s “knowledge and consent.” Since then, Samuel D. Dixon had claimed Venus as his enslaved property. Although Dixon denied Davenport’s claims and submitted a private act of sale as evidence, he was unable to convince the Orleans Parish Court that Davenport was his slave. While Davenport was unable to secure any documentary evidence, several individuals who testified on her behalf confirmed that she was in Illinois, with her owner’s consent, when the state adopted its constitution, which outlawed slavery and would have effectively rendered her free. In his written decision, Judge Charles Maurian explained that even if Dixon’s act of sale did “bear upon the face of it any mark of authenticity or genuineness, which in the opinion of this court it does not, still it would not of itself be sufficient evidence of the Defendant’s right to hold the plaintiff in slavery.”31 There were thus moments when judges could and did interrogate the validity of a bill of sale. Paper mattered, but it was not always all-powerful.

Each of the witnesses who testified on behalf of Pierre St. Amand helped connect the plaintiff to the documentary evidence that St. Amand and Nathaniel Cannon submitted to the Orleans Parish Court. When Abraham Wright and Joseph Thompson testified on September 9, 1819, they confirmed that they believed the plaintiff was the same woman Joseph Erwin purchased from “two men, brothers by the name of Smith” in North Carolina in 1806 and 1807 and trafficked to Louisiana by way of Tennessee. Samuel Spraggins testified that he met Rachel in either 1806 or 1807 on Joseph Erwin’s plantation in Iberville Parish, Louisiana. He confirmed that Erwin attempted to sell Rachel twice, but she “reverted two distinct times” to Erwin because the buyers were “incapable of fulfilling their engagements but not on account of the purchasers having any objection as to the title.” Ultimately, Spraggins claimed, Erwin was finally able to sell Rachel to Nathaniel Cannon, who then sold her to Pierre St. Amand. Cage, who was deposed before the Orleans Parish Court on March 27, 1820, described how he arrested the plaintiff, “whom he now recognizes in court.” By testifying that he knew the plaintiff was Rachel, Cage was able to bolster Joseph Thompson’s, Abraham Wright’s, and Samuel Spraggins’s respective claims that the plaintiff was an enslaved woman named Rachel who was previously Joseph Erwin’s property.

Erwin’s, Wright’s, and Spraggins’s testimony effectively connected the plaintiff to the documents that Pierre St. Amand and Nathaniel Cannon submitted to the court as evidence. And because Cage was able to confirm that Erwin recognized the plaintiff as his enslaved property less than two months earlier, his testimony helped bridge the gap between an 1813 mortgage and an 1819 act of sale. While none of the aforementioned witnesses was acquainted with St. Amand, they were nevertheless instrumental in helping him construct his history of Rachel. St. Amand’s personal knowledge, or lack thereof, regarding the plaintiff’s history was of no consequence, because as a defendant in a freedom suit, he was able to rely on the state to collect written evidence, to access a network of buyers and sellers who were invested in supporting his claims, and to ensure that his investment in the plaintiff was secure, regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit. It should be noted, however, that none of the documents that Pierre St. Amand and Nathaniel R. Cannon submitted as evidence proved that the plaintiff was Rachel. At best, they demonstrated that an enslaved woman whom enslavers agreed to call Rachel had been sold several times between 1813 and 1819. Nevertheless, it was evidence that St. Amand and Cannon were ultimately able to use to convince the Orleans Parish Court and, during a subsequent appeal, the Louisiana Supreme Court that the plaintiff was an enslaved woman named Rachel.

In his lengthy written decision, Orleans Parish Judge James Pitot described Betsey, alias Rachel, f.w.c. v. St. Amand (1819) as an “intricate and troubling case.” What seems to have disturbed Pitot most was that the case depended “on one side, upon mere testimony which far from being constantly both positive and concordant, is besides, wholly unsupported by any written document whatsoever.” The judge conceded that while “some doubts might surely have been entertained” regarding the identity of the plaintiff, she ultimately “did not establish her pretended right to liberty.” On April 25, 1820, Judge Pitot issued a verdict in favor of the defendant. The Louisiana Supreme Court would reaffirm the lower court’s decision in June of that year.

Pierre St. Amand did not need to look too far beyond the written record to convince the Orleans Parish Court and the Louisiana Supreme Court that Betsey was Rachel. The legal obligations between slave buyers and sellers in Louisiana, as well as state-archived contracts and mortgage agreements, provided St. Amand with a means of accessing all the evidence and witnesses he needed to convince the Orleans Parish Court that the plaintiff was his enslaved property. He did not have to possess extensive knowledge regarding Rachel’s or Betsey’s respective histories to do so, nor did he need to prove that the plaintiff had been legally enslaved—for instance, by securing witnesses who could confirm that she was born to an enslaved woman. Histories of sales and mortgages, created and tied together by enslavers, were more than sufficient. The archive and the courtroom favored enslavers.

Enslavers’ relationships with the state were such that they could create and gather evidence that made specific individuals recognizable as enslaved property. As a free woman of color, Betsey enjoyed no such privileges. The depositions of those who testified on Betsey’s behalf reveal that even beyond the space of the courtroom, her status as a free woman was dependent on the recognition of others, was always potentially subject to question, and could, at any moment, require verification with evidence that she could not always provide. Pierre St. Amand knew little to nothing about Betsey’s or Rachel’s history, but he was still able to make Betsey recognizable as his enslaved property in court because he had the means to create and access the evidence and to secure the witnesses necessary to corroborate his version of her past.

Not every enslaver used an act of sale to enslave someone they knew to be free, but they could have. And if they had, the vast majority of those enslaved, their lives and their pasts, remain unrecognizable to us now. Only court records from freedom suits render the processes of commodification that ensnared people such as Betsey visible. This is no accident. Enslaved people bought and sold in New Orleans were supposed to be historicized only in specific ways—namely, in terms of relationships between buyers and sellers, creditors and debtors. Contracts were spaces where enslavers could and did erase an individual’s history in favor of depicting a person as an interchangeable commodity, which is why Pierre St. Amand was able to enslave Betsey without knowing anything about her past and without demonstrating the origins of her enslavement. It was enslavers’ unique archival relationship with the state made Betsey’s transformation into Rachel possible.