On May 2, 1771, John Hardaway of Dinwiddie County, Virginia posted a notice in the Virginia Gazette about a runaway slave. The notice was ordinary, blending in with the many advertisements for escaped slaves, servants, wives, and horses that filled the classified section of the Gazette in the eighteenth century. Like countless other advertisements posted in newspapers wherever slaves were held, Hardaway's advertisement read: “Run away from the subscriber, a dark mulatto man slave named Bob Colemand, 25 years old, tall, slim, and well made, wears his own hair pretty long, his foretop combed very high, a blacksmith by trade, claimed his freedom under pretense of being of an Indian extraction.”Footnote ¹

In his advertisement, Hardaway made sure to point out that Colemand's claim to freedom through Indian ancestry was “pretense.” It is not clear from his language, however, which part of Colemand's claim he found dubious: his claim to be of “Indian extraction” or his belief that this justified his freedom. In 1771, the legal foundations of Colemand's claim that “Indian extraction” proved his freedom were incredibly vague. Freedom suits were not uncommon in seventeenth and eighteenth century Virginia courts, but few slave challenges addressed the question of Indian ancestry directly.Footnote ² Beginning in 1772, however, a growing number of mixed-race slaves brought freedom suits into Virginia courtrooms to challenge their enslavement as descendents from free maternal ancestors of “Indian extraction.”Footnote ³

In ways that he could not have foreseen at the time, Bob Colemand's family would figure prominently in the emerging case law concerning slavery and Indian ancestry. “Colemand” appears to be a misspelling of “Coleman,” a surname adopted by an extended family of slaves who initially belonged to a Virginia planter named Francis Coleman. Sometime after 1705, Francis Coleman purchased an Indian slave woman named Judith—or Judy, as she was sometimes called—in South Carolina, and brought her to his new home in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. Judith had several children—how many is nearly impossible to tell—that were eventually sold and dispersed to other slaveholders throughout Dinwiddie and beyond. In the late 1760s, Francis Coleman sold or gave some of Judith's children to John Hardaway.Footnote ⁴ Not long after the exchange, Bob Coleman ran away, citing his Indian extraction as the basis for his freedom.

Bob Coleman's relatives would soon follow his lead. The year after he made his escape, one of his relatives—probably his mother, possibly his sister—turned to the courts to claim her freedom as an Indian. In 1772, Coleman's relative, Hannah, became a plaintiff in a case of “trespass, assault and battery” against John Hardaway. The dispute, Robin v. Hardaway, became the first legal challenge in which mixed-race slaves claimed freedom in Virginia through Indian ancestry.Footnote ⁵ In bringing the issue of Indian freedom to court, the plaintiffs, “Robin, Hannah, Daniel, Cuffie, Isham, Moses, Peter, Judy, Autry, Silvia, Davy and Ned,” forced Virginians into new legal territory. Virginians had certainly confronted mixed-race freedom suits before, but the bulk of such cases concerned hybrid people of African and English parentage. The introduction of Indian ancestry into a freedom suit plunged Virginia's courts into a dialogue over race and freedom that would have profound consequences for generations of mixed-race people to come.

For at least the next 40 years, the Coleman family figured centrally in this evolving legal history. Time after time, this single family forced new legal issues into courtrooms from Virginia to Kentucky and generated heated discussion about race and ancestry among some of the nation's most elite lawyers. In addition to the 1772 case of Robin v. Hardaway, the Coleman family of slaves appeared before Virginia's high court in the 1793 case of Coleman v. Dick and Pat and in the 1807 and 1808 appeals of Pegram v. Isabell. Alongside these cases, Colemans won numerous freedom suits in lower courts in multiple counties throughout Virginia and Kentucky. As the politics of slavery and the social meanings of race shifted around them, the Coleman family pursued freedom in the courts with stubborn determination. By 1820, nearly three dozen members of this family had gained freedom in court by claiming kinship through a single Indian ancestor.

In many ways, the following article is a case study of a single slave family history. More broadly, however, it illustrates the need for deeper understanding of the ways that networks of legal information filtered through the personal relationships of enslaved people. Historians know a great deal about the judicial decisions that shaped categories of race and institutions of power during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We know comparatively little, however, about the meanings, motivations, and personal histories of the people who initiated and pursued judicial action during this period. Such information is notoriously difficult to locate; therefore, scholars have relied on available records from appellate or district courts to understand enslaved peoples’ legal pursuit of freedom. As the story of the Coleman family vividly illustrates, however, such records obscure—and, actually, distort—the way that slave plaintiffs understood their personal claims to freedom and their role in early national courts.

Tracing the history of the Coleman plaintiffs through 50 years of litigation, in fact, reveals how the legal system intentionally obscured and denied slaves’ family and personal relationships as part of the larger project of defining racial categories. As the Coleman family litigation reveals, Virginia's judicial decisions in cases of mixed-race ancestry were as centrally concerned with the legal eradication of slave family knowledge as they were with the institutional construction of race. Therefore, this article attempts to reunite the collective experiences of the enslaved Colemans and understand the legal reasons for their disappearance. It is impossible to see how law functioned across several generations of a slave family by looking at the records of published court decisions alone. However, asking basic questions about the slave plaintiffs—who were these people? why did they sue?—unearths the elaborate network of family, community, and legal knowledge concealed beneath the published case records.

Recreating the history of the Coleman family, however, is a task akin to piecing together a puzzle while blindfolded—and doing so while many, even most, of the pieces are missing. By design, slave families of the eighteenth century were systematically denied coherence. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, lawmakers worked hard to delegitimize slave relationships, deny family connections, and obscure filial ties. Alongside such institutional barriers lay significant documentary limitations. The bulk of Coleman family legal activity occurred in Virginia's District Courts and many of these records were destroyed during the Civil War.Footnote ⁶ The published records of their appeals only list first names. The only records left by the Colemans themselves appear on the pages of the Registers of Free Negroes in Virginia counties where they won freedom suits. Wherever they lived, free Colemans documented their legal victories in the public register, noting when and where they had gained their “freedom by a judgment” in District Courts.

The fact that Coleman plaintiffs gained freedom as “Indians” yet registered as “Negroes” points to the awkward place of Afro-Indian people caught between life and law. When the Coleman family first approached the courts during the revolutionary era, the social and legal meanings of race and freedom were somewhat flexible. Opposition to England inspired intense discussion about rights and equality at home, and the institution of slavery came under considerable scrutiny. By the nineteenth century, however, the entrenchment of institutionalized slavery would lead to the systematic streamlining of racial categories. White racial purity became fiercely guarded against fears of corruption by imagined black inferiority. In this context, law and society carved out a racially subordinate place for mixed-race people of African and Indian descent alike, in opposition to white superiority. Legally free as Indians, they became socially defined as black.

The legal and social degradation of Afro-Indian people was not the project of white Americans alone. With the expansion of the slave state at the turn of the century, southeastern Indians began to embrace white racism in efforts to distance themselves from associations with low-status blacks. As historians Tiya Miles and Claudio Saunt illustrate, such transitions fractured families with long histories of mixed Native and African ancestry.Footnote ⁷ As southeastern Indian people embraced the racial hierarchies defined by Anglo-American law, the place of hybrid people such as the Colemans grew increasingly ambiguous. Their long history of legal challenge suggests that the courts represented one arena in which they tried to resolve this ambiguity. As such, they illustrate what historian James Brooks explains as the crucial “role of hybrid peoples themselves in the assertion and continuing construction of ethnic and racial difference.”Footnote ⁸ Members of the Coleman family became part of a much larger story by which Afro-Indian people participated in the creation and complication of racial identity through their collective legal efforts to prove their connection to an Indian foremother and escape race-based slavery.

Many of the Coleman family cases are familiar to historians of race and slavery. Scholars have often considered their cases side by side in discussions of legal change, yet they have never connected the dots to uncover relations between them. The broad experience of the Coleman family saga has remained hidden in obscurity whereas the arguments of the imminent lawyers who debated their significance have taken center stage. In many ways, this oversight renders the Coleman family unwittingly party to and guilty of what historian E.P. Thompson called “the crime of anonymity.”Footnote ⁹ Overlooking the personal lives and private motivations behind their long, drawn-out legal struggles risks perpetuating the very lies that slave law would have us believe: that slaves had no families, that enslaved men and women had no roots. Digging deep into the Coleman family's legal history helps us understand the complex transformations that turned people into plaintiffs.

With this in mind, this article begins with an exploration of the figure that anchored the Coleman family's history, the maternal Indian ancestor who shaped their personal and legal struggles for over a century.

Judith Coleman, or “Indian Judith”

The figure at the heart of the Coleman family claims to freedom was their common ancestor, a woman known variously as Judith, Judy, or “Indian Judith” in the records. Although several generations of Colemans would celebrate Judith's “Indian-ness” in court as the foundation of their freedom, she herself lived most, if not all, of her life as a slave. Similarly to most enslaved women, Judith left no personal records herself. Her life emerges through the recollections of others: her own family and the people who owned her, bought her, and sold her. Such memories are problematic in many ways, at once distorted by the passage of time and shaped by the demands of family memory. However, they remain the only fleeting insight into the personal history of an otherwise obscure woman's passage through fraught and evolving regimes of colonial slavery.

The slaveholder from whom the Colemans would take their surname was Francis Coleman, Sr., who purchased Judith in South Carolina sometime after 1705. The English Colemans were part of an early Virginia family. The earliest Coleman records in Virginia date from the 1650s, when Robert Coleman, Sr. received a patent to land on the south side of the Appomattox River in what is now Prince George County.Footnote ¹⁰ Throughout the seventeenth century, Robert and his son, Robert Coleman, Jr., actively bought and sold land around Petersburg and Hopewell, Virginia. By the early eighteenth century, descendants of Robert Coleman, Sr. began to branch out and speculate in wider geographic circles. In 1712, Francis Coleman, Sr., the grandson of the original Coleman family patriarch, began to survey land around Butterwood Creek in what would become Dinwiddie County, Virginia.Footnote ¹¹ Within a few years, Francis Coleman, Sr. moved his family to establish a new household in this area.

The family that Francis Coleman Sr. settled along Butterwood Creek included his blood relatives, his kin through marriage, and his enslaved laborers. By the early eighteenth century, Virginia planters were beginning to embrace a mythology that envisioned the plantation—slave workers included—as a single family working together under the care and protective guidance of its male head. Francis Coleman, Sr. held the position of family patriarch over the members of his English household, which included his wife, Honor, his son Francis Coleman, Jr., his son's young bride, Mary, and their newborn daughter, Amy.Footnote ¹² At the same time, he was just as likely to have considered any enslaved workers or indentured servants moving with him to Butterwood Creek to be part of his extended “family” as well. Just how slaves interpreted this family mythology is hard to know, but the fact that the Coleman slaves kept their surname for many generations suggests that they, at the very least, understood the powerful ways that name and family could create connection and power in early Virginia.Footnote ¹³

At some point before Francis Coleman, Sr. moved his family to the Dinwiddie area, he added a young Indian slave named Judith to his household. The exact date that the Colemans purchased Judith is unclear, but it was probably some time after 1705 and before 1715, when Francis, Sr. settled along Butterwood Creek. Before the family relocated, Francis Coleman Sr. and his then 17-year-old son, Francis, Jr., took a trip to South Carolina, perhaps with the explicit purpose of buying slaves to outfit their new plantation. Whether or not this was the intention of their trip, the father and son team did purchase and return home with at least one slave acquisition, the Indian girl Judith, who was around “13 or fourteen years old” at the time. They paid “twenty five pounds” for her.Footnote ¹⁴

Who was this young girl who would become so important for generations of her family to come? Later accounts recall that she was the child of an unknown father and an enslaved mother who was the property of a South Carolina man named William Peters. According to Peters, Judith's mother died while her daughter was an “infant.” Peters informed Coleman that after Judith's mother died, one of his own daughters took her in and raised her. Peters’ daughter taught Judith “house business,” suggesting that she was probably trained as a domestic servant. By the time Peters sold Judith to Francis Coleman, Sr., he claimed that she knew housework “as well as one of his daughters.”Footnote ¹⁵

Some of the most crucial information about Judith's past emerges in a later deposition of Francis Coleman's grandson. The grandson explained that although Judith “died when I was too young to know her” he remembered that her daughter, Jenny, “has frequently told me that her mother called herself an Appalachian Indian.”Footnote ¹⁶ This memory that Judith referred to herself as an “Appalachian Indian” was most likely lost in translation. A number of clues suggest that it is far more plausible that Judith identified herself as an “Apalachee Indian.” Alongside the family recollection, the location and timing of Judith's purchase in South Carolina suggest Apalachee origins. The Apalachee originally hailed from northern Florida and first encountered the Spanish empire in the sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Although the Apalachee initially fought off the Spanish with great might, disease decimated their numbers and they were absorbed into the Spanish mission system in the seventeenth century. According to historian Alan Gallay, the English launched a massive attack against the Apalachee in their efforts to weaken the Spanish empire during the early eighteenth century. In 1704, the English raided Apalachee mission towns and claimed to have “killed, and taken as slaves 325 men, and have taken slaves 4,000 women and children.”Footnote ¹⁸ They subsequently carried these captives back to South Carolina.Footnote ¹⁹

Were Judith and her mother among these 4,000 enslaved women and children? It is impossible to know for sure. The timing, location and family memory of an “Appalachian Indian” ancestor suggest that, at the very least, Judith's mother was probably part of or witness to this series of events. As Virginians embraced the legalization of Indian slavery at the end of the seventeenth century, imperial struggles with Spain created bountiful opportunities for traffic in war captives.Footnote ²⁰ The English probably enslaved Judith's mother after the 1704 raid. It is hard to know if the infant Judith was with her at the time or if she was the product of a sexual union that took place in Carolina. It is tempting to think that Judith was born a free Indian in an Apalachee mission. However, given estimates of her age and evidence of her mother's death soon after childbirth, it is more likely that Judith was born enslaved in the wake of a violent colonial enterprise.

Although Judith came of age as a slave, she became a powerful symbol of liberation for her children and grandchildren. She appeared to have had many children, although how many is hard to tell. In 1772, shortly after Bob “Colemand” ran away from John Hardaway under the “pretense” of being an Indian, one of Judith's daughters challenged her enslavement in court as the descendent of a free woman. Freedom suits based on maternal ancestry were not new to Virginia law. During the seventeenth century, Virginia lawmakers confronted the issue that slaves might sue for freedom as descendents of free English people. In 1662, Virginia legislators passed a measure declaring that all children would follow the status of their mothers to ensure that offspring of enslaved African women and English fathers would remain slaves.Footnote ²¹ Faced with the dilemma of mixed-race children born of free white mothers, lawmakers passed a measure that criminalized interracial marriage and banished English women who gave birth to multiracial children.Footnote ²² Although the language of race was still inchoate during the seventeenth century, early Virginia lawmakers primarily focused legislation on prohibitions between English and African relationships. Indian status in the multiracial landscape of colonial Virginia remained somewhat unclear.Footnote ²³

Robin v. Hardaway (1772)

It was unclear, at least, until Judith's daughter, Hannah, joined a group of plaintiffs who forced the issue of Indian slavery before the court. Hannah was the slave property of a man named John Hardaway, who had close ties to Francis Coleman's family. Over several decades, their respective families had grown connected through marriage and commerce.Footnote ²⁴ They exchanged property in both slaves and land. And, as their families grew closer together, so too did the families of the slaves that they owned.

Hannah became the property of John Hardaway sometime in the late 1760s. She was originally the property of Thomas Hardaway, who acquired two enslaved sisters from Francis Coleman after he married into Coleman's family. In a deposition years later, Thomas Hardaway's son explained that, “a great many years ago . . . [his father] bought two girls of Francis Coleman, Junr, as slaves which appeared to him to have Indian blood in them, by the names of Cate and Hannah, who were always allowed to be sisters.”Footnote ²⁵ Shortly thereafter, he recalled, his “father let his brother John Hardaway have Hannah either by gift or sale.” The two sisters, Cate and Hannah, deponents claimed “were the daughters of one old Judy formerly the property [of] Francis Coleman.”Footnote ²⁶

In 1772, Hannah would join eleven other plaintiffs in the case of Robin v. Hardaway to question the legality of Indian slavery under Virginia law. Argued before Virginia's General Court, the case consolidated the claims of multiple plaintiffs “against persons who held them in slavery, to try their titles to freedom.” The plaintiffs claimed they were, collectively, “descendents of Indian women brought into this country by traders, at several times between the years 1682 and 1748.”Footnote ²⁷ Attorney Thomson MasonFootnote ²⁸, the younger brother of George Mason, argued for the plaintiffs while Thomas Jefferson recorded notes on the proceedings and provided crucial bits of original evidence from his personal legal collection.Footnote ²⁹

Mason's arguments in the case concerned the legality of Indian slavery in Virginia and the timing of its alleged prohibition. Virginians’ approach to Indian slavery changed many times during the seventeenth century. In 1670, Virginians explicitly outlawed the enslavement of Indians through a law that distinguished them as servants rather than slaves, as the latter category was fast becoming associated with Africans. The 1670 Act specified that all non-Christians brought into the colony “by shipping” were to be considered “slaves for their lives.” In contrast, those who came into the colony “by land”—meaning those Indian people who were sold to Virginians by other Indians as war captives—would serve for a term of “twelve years and no longer.”Footnote ³⁰ In other words, imported Africans were to become slaves whereas Indian people would be only servants.

In the 1680s, Virginia lawmakers changed course. In the wake of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, Virginia authorities took measures to stabilize the volatile social order in the colony by consolidating slave laws into a regime that placed a premium on white freedom and collapsed people of color into an expanding category of subordinate racial “otherness.” Recognizing the powerful hatred toward Indians unleashed by Bacon's forces, Virginians seamlessly embraced their enslavement alongside that of Africans. In 1682, Virginia legislators legalized Indian slavery by eliminating the distinction between importation via land or sea. Passed as “An act to repeale a former law makeing Indians and others free,” the 1682 law stated that “all servants . . . brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether Negroes, Moors, Mulattoes, or Indians . . . shall be adjuged, deemed and taken to be slaves.”Footnote ³¹ With this measure, historian Edmund Morgan explains, white Virginians still reeling from the unrest of Bacon's Rebellion began to “lump [Indians and Africans] together in a lower common denominator of racist hatred and contempt.”Footnote ³²

The 1682 measure led to a dramatic increase in the buying and selling of Indians as slaves. Alongside an increasingly robust African slave trade, the 1682 law opened new pipelines into sources of Indian labor. Trade networks between Virginia landholders and slave traders in the Carolinas proved particularly lucrative.Footnote ³³ Traders such as William Peters of South Carolina, the man who originally sold Judith to Francis Coleman, found valuable, new markets for Indian slaves in aspiring Virginia planters.

Although white Virginians embraced Indian slavery through much of the eighteenth century, lawyers in the case of Robin v. Hardaway debated whether or not certain Virginia statutes had tacitly outlawed the practice decades earlier. Arguing for the plaintiffs, Attorney Mason placed two issues before the court. First, he claimed that the language of two early Virginia statutes, passed in 1691 and 1705, respectively, had repealed the 1682 Act that legalized Indian slavery. The first law, passed in 1691, he argued, legalized free trade with Indians.Footnote ³⁴ Mason claimed that legalizing free trade with Indian people eliminated the capacity to enslave them. “Can we suppose,” he posited, “that as soon as they came, they should be picked up and sold as slaves? If so, this fair faced act was but a trap to catch them.”Footnote ³⁵ He argued that granting Indian people the right to trade within the Virginia colony gave them the rights of free people, including “all incidents necessary to the exercise of that right, as protection of their persons, properties, &c.”Footnote ³⁶

Similarly, Mason claimed that an act of 1705 only referred to slaves who “were shipped,” and, therefore, only pertained to imported African slaves. This language, he argued, technically outlawed the enslavement of Indians traded on the mainland. The 1705 statute, “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves,” represented Virginia's first comprehensive slave code.Footnote ³⁷ It contained the entire body of the 1691 law and added that, “all servants imported and brought into this country, by sea or land, who were not christians in their native country . . . before they were shipped . . . shall be accounted and be slaves.”Footnote ³⁸ Mason contended that the word “shipped” constituted a repeal of Indian slavery. He explained that the 1705 slave code concerned “such foreign infidels . . . as are brought hither by sea, and not the free Aborigines of this continent.”Footnote ³⁹

Mason's arguments were subtle, yet speculative. His interpretation of Virginia's legal history regarding Indian slavery projected intentionality onto the early statutes that did not reflect actual practice. Virginians continued to enslave Indians and categorize them as slaves well after 1705. If, as Mason claimed, Virginia lawmakers intended to outlaw Indian slavery by inserting the word “shipped” into the 1705 statute, it was an emancipatory act that was not enforced. Mason's highly creative reading, therefore, constructed a narrative of Indian slavery that served his interests in the present but little reflected the actual nature of the institution in the past.

The liberties that Mason took in his reading of the Virginia statues, however, were not as crucial as the second, more sweeping, argument he presented to the court. After explaining Virginia's early legal history regarding Indian slavery, Mason introduced the idea that any laws enslaving Indian people were violations of their natural rights. In making this claim, Mason applied ideas used by his revolutionary contemporaries—notably, including his brother, George—to frame colonial opposition to England to a domestic case of slave liberation. Beginning in the 1760s, a new generation of colonial lawyers articulated a radical critique of imperial policy as violations of both constitutional and natural rights.Footnote ⁴⁰ First presented by James Otis in his 1761 case against the Writs of Assistance, this thinking cast imperial measures as abuses of parliamentary authority and, therefore, as violations of constitutional law. More importantly, they conceived of such violations as contrary to the basic set of God-given natural rights that resided in every individual.

The consequences of such an interpretation of natural rights were considerable. In theory, the idea that all beings possessed natural rights had far-reaching implications about human equality. Taken to its full egalitarian possibilities, even subordinate populations of slaves, women, and the poor possessed an unassailable set of natural rights. When John Adams later recalled Otis’ original argument in the Writs of Assistance case, he acknowledged that his conclusions implied the natural equality of the enslaved. Natural rights, he wrote, “were inherent and inalienated but by ideots or madmen . . . Nor were the poor negroes forgotten.”Footnote ⁴¹ The celebration of natural human equality could have profound social and economic consequences if taken to its logical abolitionist extreme. For the most part, however, the real threat of upsetting slavery remained fairly academic. As colonial leaders developed their revolutionary resistance around such radical egalitarian thinking, they advanced an ideology that contained the seeds of a very real critique of slavery. However, for the most part, the possibility of abolition unleashed by natural rights thinking remained in the realm of intellectual exercise.

At least, it did until Thomson Mason applied such arguments to a case involving the actual liberation of slaves. In Robin v. Hardaway, Mason applied the same logic that his revolutionary contemporaries had used against the English to actually emancipate Virginia slaves. In doing so, he drew explicit connections between his wrongfully enslaved clients and the oppressed American colonists. The violations enacted upon Indian slaves, who had no voice in the making of laws subjecting them to slavery, he argued, were the same violations imposed upon colonists without representation in Parliament. “If natural right, independence, defect of representation, and disavowal of protection are not sufficient to keep [Indians] from the coercion of our laws,” he asked, “on what other principles can we justify our opposition to some late acts of power exercised over us by the British legislature?”Footnote ⁴² In making such connections, Mason had, in some ways, turned a safe ideological abstraction into a threatening material reality. A hypothetical discussion of human equality was one thing; an actual application of natural rights theory to liberate slaves in a court of law was quite another. “The laws of nature are the laws of God,” Mason claimed, “whose authority can be superseded by no power an earth.”Footnote ⁴³ Mason asserted outright that the supremacy of a higher law justified the emancipation of slaves.

The case of Robin v. Hardaway, therefore, gave real form to the conflict between freedom and slavery at the heart of revolutionary rhetoric. For many Virginians, this was simply too far. When Thomson's brother, George Mason inserted this same logic in his original draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, for example, his contemporaries backed away from his initial language. In his original draft, George Mason claimed “That all Men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural Rights, of which they can not by any Compact, deprive or divest their Posterity.”Footnote ⁴⁴ His fellow delegates insisted that he add a clause to specify that the only men entitled to such rights were those who “enter into a state of society.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The editorial change ensured that slaves, who were excluded from entering “into a state of society,” would not gain further access to the language of natural rights. The editorial change allowed for an abstract solution to a real problem.

It is not enough, however, to view Robin v. Hardaway within the context of revolutionary agitation alone. Although Thomson Mason's reasoning made explicit connections to slavery as a political metaphor for imperial abuses of power, Robin v. Hardaway must also be understood within the context of an emerging transatlantic conversation about slavery and emancipation. The case of Robin v. Hardaway was contemporary with the announcement of Lord Mansfield's landmark decision in case of Somerset v. Stewart. Widely publicized in the American colonies, England's Somerset case would fundamentally alter the foundations of Anglo-American slave law. The case involved a Virginia slave, James Somerset, who traveled to England with his owner and subsequently ran away. Once captured, Somerset's owner decided to sell him back into slavery in Jamaica. Abolitionists took up the cause of Somerset's freedom and his case appeared before Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench.

Although historians continue to debate the meaning of Mansfield's decision, the effective result of Somerset was to end slavery in England while allowing the institution to persist in the colonies throughout the English empire. In subtle ways, the decisions in Robin v. Hardaway and Somerset share important political impulses. Both decisions balanced radical ideological arguments for freedom with conservative political realities of slavery. On the one hand, the Somerset case confirmed the abstract belief that all English people were inherently free and established the principle that slaves who set foot on England's soil were entitled to freedom. On the other hand, Mansfield's decision sidestepped the highly volatile politics of colonial slavery and left relationships with slaveholders in America and the Caribbean largely intact. It allowed England to commit to freedom without jeopardizing their lucrative investments in the colonies.Footnote ⁴⁶

On the other side of the Atlantic, the decision in Robin v. Hardaway would similarly balance radical arguments about individual liberty against political realities of human slavery. Mason championed Indians as free by claiming that slavery violated natural rights. This argument, however, made explicit distinctions between Indian and African slaves, thus, leaving the latter group in bondage. As in Somerset, the case of Robin v. Hardaway allowed the Virginia court to claim the universality of rights without upsetting the institution of slavery. From this perspective, the decision in Robin illuminates how the politics of slavery underscored shared imperial interests more than it forecasted revolutionary impulses.

Therefore, the decision in Robin v. Hardaway created a set of interconnected precedents. The first created formal precedent within case law that established new boundaries around slavery and freedom in Virginia. The second legitimated personal genealogy that created opportunities for those who could prove descent to claim actual freedom. The judgment in the case claimed “the Plts are free and not slaves” and assessed “damages of one shilling” plus court costs.Footnote ⁴⁷ This judgment, effectively, manifested freedom in two different ways: one legal and one personal. These interconnected relationships between these two consequences—one that established legal precedent in the formal law and one that validated personal genealogies in lived experience—would shift and change as the Colemans continued to sue over subsequent decades.

Coleman v. Dick and Pat (1793)

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the legacy of Robin v. Hardaway would shape the legal history of slavery and the family history of the Colemans in different ways. In the years after the outbreak of the Revolution, Virginia lawmakers would continue to shift the boundaries of slavery and freedom. In 1779, Virginia legislators passed a non-importation law in an effort to curtail the slave trade. A few years later in 1782, Virginia passed a manumission act outlining procedures for voluntary emancipation. Such measures created new opportunities for slaves to locate loopholes and challenge masters who “illegally detained” them in slavery or held them in “false imprisonment.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Coupled with the blossoming of antislavery movements in Virginia in the 1780s and 1790s, slaves gained new access to the courts to challenge their status.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Coleman family maneuvered within this shifting legal landscape of the early republic to claim freedom through their shared genealogy. It was in this context that the Coleman family once again found themselves at the center of legal debate before Virginia's highest court. In 1793, a case involving descendents of Judith Coleman reached the Virginia Court of Appeals. The case, Coleman v. Dick and Pat, originated in the District Court of Petersburg, where Dick and Pat sued for freedom against their owner, Williamson Coleman.Footnote ⁵⁰ Dick Coleman may have initiated legal action years earlier. In 1787, the Overseers of the Poor in Henrico County bound out “Dick, orphan of Judy Coleman, deceased.”Footnote ⁵¹ When slaves initiated freedom suits, courts often bound them out for a term of service to another master for the duration of the trial to ensure fair treatment. Perhaps Dick worked for another master while working through a legal challenge against his own? The records are silent on such matters.

Whatever the origins of this particular challenge, the appeal of the lower court's decision placed Dick and Pat's fate in the hands of some of Virginia's most formidable lawyers. The Petersburg District Court granted their freedom on the grounds that they were “lineally descended by the maternal line from Judith; that Judith was an Indian . . . [t]hat she was brought into the state by a certain Francis Coleman sometime after the year 1705.”Footnote ⁵² When Francis Coleman's family appealed the decision, they secured the help of attorney John Wickham. Arguing for the Coleman slaves was Wickham's good friend and colleague, John Marshall.

The arguments between Wickham and Marshall revisited many of the same questions raised by Thomson Mason in Robin v. Hardaway in 1772, but did so from a very different historical context. In contrast to Mason's earlier arguments about the natural rights of Indian people to freedom, the debate in Coleman v. Dick and Pat considered the abstraction of freedom against the real concerns of property. Much had changed by 1793. For the past 20 years, a growing body of litigation initiated by Virginia slaves had rendered the consequences of freedom suits increasingly complex. Afro-Indian slaves, in particular, forced lawmakers to navigate the messy personal terrain of race and ancestry.Footnote ⁵³ The court generally presumed that Indian people were naturally free, but by the 1790s, the imperatives of natural rights were tempered by the deepening social and political realities of slavery. Dick and Pat faced a very different court than their relative, Hannah, had in 1772. By 1793, the court approached Afro-Indian freedom suits with a new level of hesitation about the impact of such challenges to the institution of slavery as a whole.

The debate in Coleman v. Dick and Pat covered two main areas. First, the lawyers revisited the Virginia statutes of 1691 and 1705 to determine whether they had actually outlawed Indian slavery.Footnote ⁵⁴ As in Robin v. Hardaway, the judges resolved that Indian slavery had been outlawed by the act of 1705, but they expressed some reservations about claiming that the provision allowing for “free trade” with Indians constituted a blanket act of emancipation. Some Indians, they explained, might still be considered slaves. Since 1705, they argued, “no American Indian can be reduced into a state of slavery.” However, they did maintain that some “Foreign Indians . . . might be made slaves.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Reflecting a level of discomfort with the inability of existing racial categories to differentiate between Indian people of diverse origins, they explained that when “we speak of Indians generally, it is to be understood, that some might, but others might not be made slaves in this country.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The second issue the lawyers tackled was the veracity of Judith's “Indian-ness.” Attorney Wickham agreed that maternal ancestry to a free Indian foremother proved Dick and Pat's freedom, yet he questioned the capacity of the plaintiffs to know Judith's background. Wickham agreed that Judith was of Indian descent, but asked: just how Indian was she? Judith entered Virginia as a slave of dubious or unclear genealogy, he claimed. Given their limited knowledge of her past, “it does not sufficiently appear, that she was an Indian” because nobody knows if “Judith was an Indian, or the descendent of one.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Judith may have been a mixed-race child of a slave mother of African descent and a Indian father. Without clear knowledge of her background, reasonable doubt precluded a declaration of freedom. John Marshall countered with the claim that motherhood was the only issue considered by law. Judith must be an Indian, he claimed, “because where marriages are unknown, the father can never be certainly ascertained.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Marshall explained that Judith must be presumed Indian through the maternal line because, in issues of unknown parentage, “the law acknowledges no father.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The court was unable to reach consensus about this particular question. They acknowledged the perceived “insufficiency of the finding” respecting Judith's Indian identity, but remained “divided” upon the issue.Footnote ⁶⁰ Despite internal dissent, the justices ultimately upheld the lower court's decision to award Dick and Pat their freedom. They did not do so, however, without considerable reservations. They agreed that Indian slavery was illegal most of the time, but would not concede all cases. Similarly, they agreed that maternal Indian ancestry merited freedom, but considered slave claims about family history too vague and insufficient to warrant emancipation all of the time. Although they upheld the decision, the court remained divided over the legitimacy of slave family claims.

The decision in Coleman v. Dick and Pat reflected a degree of hesitation in the court's approach to Afro-Indian freedom suits. Although the enslaved Colemans won their freedom, the court had retreated in many ways from the revolutionary-era embrace of liberty that emerged in Thomson Mason's argument in Robin v. Hardaway. By 1793, the court weighed these revolutionary principles against the growing ambivalence about the fate of slavery in the Commonwealth. Although some Virginians embraced antislavery thinking during the 1790s, they faced considerable economic obstacles. Attorney Wickham raised the issue directly by suggesting that the decision of the court might have an adverse impact on the institution of slavery as a whole. If the descendents of a slave who was purchased and imported “as a slave” could be emancipated with such flimsy and unsubstantiated evidence about her personal background, Wickham argued, “what, let me ask, will be the situation of our negro property?”Footnote ⁶¹ The case, he suggested, placed a burden of proof on the slaveholder that was far too heavy. “If the master, in every instance, is bound to prove his negro to be of that particular description, which subjects him to slavery,” he warned, “there is not one in ten thousand instances, where he could do so.”Footnote ⁶²

On this point, some members of the court agreed. They were unable to find consensus over the questionable origins of Judith's “Indian-ness” and were somewhat suspect of slave testimony concerning their own family histories. Taking slave testimony at its word, Wickham explained, created “a state of too much uncertainty.”Footnote ⁶³ He argued that the court, and not the plaintiffs, should determine free or slave status: “As individuals, [the slave plaintiffs] may form their own conjectures as to the fact. As judges, the fact must be found for them, and that with certainty.”Footnote ⁶⁴ At least some members of the court agreed that there must be limits on how much authority slaves could claim over their own family histories.

The decision of the court in Coleman v. Dick and Pat meant very different things to the lawyers and judges involved than it did to the extended Coleman slave family. Whereas the legal precedent cast a degree of doubt upon the ability of slaves to claim knowledge of their own families, the impact of the decision sent Judith Coleman's descendents scrambling into the courts to prove their connection to her. For the extended Coleman family of slaves, the decision in Coleman v. Dick and Pat inspired multiple legal challenges in several Virginia counties and even one claim that migrated into the new state of Kentucky. Although Judith herself was long dead by the end of the eighteenth century, her memory remained very much alive through the litigation of her descendents. The Court of Appeals may have expressed doubt about slave claims to family connections, but Judith Coleman's extended family embraced their connection to her in a stream of litigation that flowed steadily through time and space.Footnote ⁶⁵

Judith's Descendents and the Legal Evolution of Race

The rush of freedom suits in the wake of Coleman v. Dick and Pat illustrates how the project of defining race and freedom in the late eighteenth was very much a joint endeavor between the legal establishment and otherwise anonymous slave plaintiffs. Defining the meaning of Indian ancestry in law was not the job of the early national courts alone. By the late eighteenth century, few of the Coleman family plaintiffs ever knew Judith while she was alive. However, time after time, her descendents rooted their claims to Indian identity through her as they initiated legal challenges. As plaintiffs, the Coleman family celebrated and clung to the part of their past that was Indian as a means of distancing themselves from black slavery. They claimed meaning in their Indian roots and repeatedly forced the courts to contend with their own understanding of those roots. In many ways, Indian identity became a legal performance that distanced them from slavery.

The cases that unfolded in the wake of Coleman v. Dick and Pat reveal how networks of communication dispersed legal knowledge through family, even as children, siblings and cousins were sold, hired out, and separated across considerable distance. In 1794 in Brunswick County, for example, a slave named David led a freedom suit against Joseph Hardaway. The suit involved “David, Judy, Daniel, Abby, Letty and Dick, Indians and paupers,” who claimed to be “lineally descended in the maternal line from Judith . . . brought into Virginia by a certain Francis Coleman.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Evidence of other legal challenges emerges only in the pages of the Register of Free Negroes, where freed Colemans documented their courtroom triumphs with local authorities. For example, Charles Coleman registered his freedom in Petersburg, Virginia on August 18, 1794 after being “liberated by a judgment of Gen'l Court from John Hardaway of Dinwiddie County being a descendent of an Indian woman.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Two days later, three women, Betty, Nancy and Tempe Coleman recorded that they had been freed “by a judgment of the Gen'l Court” against John Hardaway as being “descendant of an Indian.”Footnote ⁶⁸ At least six entries in the Register specifically mention freedom suits against the Hardaway family as descendents of an Indian foremother.

The fact that the Coleman slaves won their freedom as “Indians,” yet had to record their status on the free register for “Negroes” points to the dissonant reality faced by mixed-race people at the turn of the century. Despite Virginia's revolutionary-era embrace of liberty—an impulse that produced new manumission guidelines, abolitionist activity, and a handful of high-profile plans for gradual emancipation—much had changed by the 1790s.Footnote ⁶⁹ Anxious over a growing population of free blacks, Virginians began to scale back the rules of manumissions.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the 1790s, Virginians watched a slave revolution unfold in Saint Domingue and, by the turn of the century, faced news of Gabriel Prosser's plot for slave insurrection at home. By the early nineteenth century, white Virginians’ anxieties over slave uprisings at home produced new concerns over the security of racial classification and the stability of white supremacy. In this context, lawmakers passed new measures to police the boundaries of race and protect the imagined sanctity of racial difference.

Concern over racial identity became a central focus in one case involving Coleman family members who ended up in Kentucky in the late 1790s. The case surfaced in the extant court records of Fayette County, Kentucky among the few manuscript cases to survive the 1803 courthouse fire in Lexington. The case involved three adult siblings—Lucy the elder, James, and Cesar—and three minors—Lucy the younger, Hannah, and Jane—against William Nunnally.Footnote ⁷¹ The plaintiffs claimed to be from Dinwiddie County, Virginia and were descendents of “Indian Judith,” the property of Francis Coleman.Footnote ⁷²

In Lucy v. Nunnally, the enslaved Colemans hired Kentucky lawyer Henry Clay to pursue their case. Although Clay would become a defender of slaveholder's rights later in life, he began his career as a vocal opponent of slavery.Footnote ⁷³ By the time he took on the Colemans’ case, Clay had established a name for himself as a formidable lawyer with a growing practice. In 1802, Clay deposed an elderly Francis Coleman about his clients. His questions focused on “Indian Judith's” physical appearance. Clay asked Coleman to describe what he could recall about Judith's features and those of her descendents. Coleman replied that his parents described Judith as “a perfect Indian, with long and straight hair.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Clay asked his witness if he could “distinguish” anything about the skin tones of the plaintiffs. The deponent responded that “James … is of a rather yellow complexion, Cesar is very black and Lucy is between both in Colour.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Clay's interest in external markers of race reflected a reliance on physical appearance that would soon dominate slave freedom suits in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁶ By the nineteenth century, judges and juries generally accepted that Indian people were entitled to freedom and that people of African descent were generally subject to slavery. How to evaluate who had Indian and who had African roots, however, was chronically difficult. Afro-Indian freedom suits defied the imagined clarity of a black-white racial binary. By the early nineteenth century, courts increasingly relied on external markers of racial difference over slave claims to family genealogies as evidence. The most famous example of this was the 1806 Virginia case of Hudgins v. Wrights. This case, which also involved Afro-Indian plaintiffs claiming freedom through a maternal Indian ancestor, established that physical features, rather than genealogical evidence, determined racial identity. In his decision, Judge St. George Tucker explained that if three individuals came before the court representing “a black or mulatto man or woman with a flat nose and wooly head; a copper-coloured person with long jetty black, straight hair; and one with a fair complexion, brown hair . . . with a prominent Roman nose,” the evidence was clear who was slave and who was free.Footnote ⁷⁷ Physical features, in other words, tell the judge everything he needs to know about race, slavery and freedom. The nose on one's face explained family history far better than any genealogical evidence a plaintiff brought to court.

Such logic devalued the personal histories that slave plaintiffs brought forward as evidence and placed a premium on physical appearance. In many ways, such thinking echoed concerns that John Wickham had expressed more than a decade earlier in Coleman v. Dick and Pat. In 1793, Wickham warned against bestowing too much faith in evidence brought to court by slaves. He cautioned that slave ancestry could rarely be substantiated. Taking slave family history at its word, he suggested, could potentially open a Pandora's Box of slave claims to free maternal ancestors with very little way to determine their validity. The result of such anxiety was that the courts viewed racially complicated people such as the Colemans through an increasingly limited spectrum of black and white. Although liberated as free Indians, the Colemans had to register as free Negroes. As legal subjects, they gained one racial identity. As individuals in public, they gained another. Neither law nor society could make sense of their complex past.

At the same time that the legal system devalued slave family history, however, litigation united Coleman family plaintiffs. By the turn of the nineteenth century, descendents of Judith Coleman initiated freedom suits against multiple different slaveholders. In two such 1798 cases, Tom v. Foster and Phillis v. Tucker, multiple plaintiffs gained freedom in the Petersburg District Court as descendents of Judith. In the Phillis case, “Phillis, Phebe, Eaton, Poll, and Sarah” won their case of “false imprisonment” against Benjamin Tucker claiming they were “free as lineally descended from Judith, an Indian woman.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1799, another Petersburg case, Ned v. Wilson claimed kinship to Judith as well. All three cases relied on testimony from an aging Francis Coleman who “did represent the said original Indian stock Judith . . . as having been an Indian.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Also in 1799, “Nanny, Jenny, Dicey, Jemmy, Edy and Allen,” won their freedom in Petersburg District Court from Stephen Mayes. Depositions in later litigation confirmed that “Nanny . . . who recovered her freedom agst Stephen Mayes” was “descended in the maternal line from the said Indian woman Judy.”Footnote ⁸⁰

This last case, Nanny v. Mayes, had a complex background and a complicated legacy. From a social perspective, the figure of Nanny herself was rife with contradictions. In many ways, Nanny embodied the various dilemmas faced by the Coleman family specifically, and Afro-Indian people generally, at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Nanny, also called Nancy, was described as a “brown black negroe colour” with “long bushy hair like an Indian.”Footnote ⁸¹ Her original owner, a man named William Pegram, died some time near 1780. After Pegram's death, his widow, Elizabeth, hired Nanny out to her husband, a free black man named Will. Under this arrangement, one observer recalled, Nanny “lived as a free woman with her said husband the negroe man called Will” for several decades.Footnote ⁸² When Stephen Mayes inherited ownership of Nanny through marriage to one of Elizabeth Pegram's daughters, she sued for her freedom as the descendent of an Indian through the maternal line. Mayes did not contest the claim, so Nanny became free.

Nanny embodied the impossible set of contradictions that characterized the lived and legal experiences of race, slavery, and ancestry by the turn of the century. She lived as “a free woman,” but was legally a slave. She was cast racially as black, but defined as an Indian in law. She lived with her free husband, but had no legal connection to him. She was grounded physically in one household, but transferred on paper as the possession of others. She had a clear sense of her own family history; however, her claims to kinship were viewed as increasingly suspect before the law.

Pegram v. Isabell (1807;1808)

Such contradictions became crucial when Nanny's two daughters initiated freedom suits in the early nineteenth century. Nanny and Will had at least two daughters, Caty and Isabell, who, as children of an enslaved mother, became slaves themselves. In the wake of their mother's successful freedom suit, both daughters petitioned for freedom. Caty initiated a freedom suit in Brunswick County, Virginia in 1803. At the time she sued, Caty was a grown woman with a child of her own. She was the property of a man named John Simms who married into the Pegram family. After Simms’ death, his executor, John Wyche, hired Caty and her son, Mark Alexander, to a man named George Atkins. After her mother's successful lawsuit, Caty sued Wyche and Atkins for freedom, claiming that she, like Nanny, “was descended of a free woman.”Footnote ⁸³

Alongside Caty's suit, Nanny and Will's other daughter, Isabell, sued for her freedom against her mother's original owner, Elizabeth Pegram. Isabell, who, “styling herself an Indian and a pauper,” petitioned for her freedom in Petersburg District Court.Footnote ⁸⁴ The action could not have been a surprise to Pegram. The Pegram family was connected to Francis Coleman's family through marriage and undoubtedly knew of their litigious slaves. In 1776, Elizabeth Pegram's son married the daughter of Williamson Coleman, from whom Dick and Pat won their freedom in 1793.Footnote ⁸⁵ Pegram was probably familiar with Williamson Coleman's failed appeal in Coleman v. Dick and Pat. Nonetheless, when the lower court granted Isabell her freedom in 1807, Elizabeth Pegram appealed the decision. The suit, Pegram v. Isabell, represented the third time that Virginia's high court reviewed a case involving the mixed-race plaintiffs descended from Judith Coleman.

The case of Pegram v. Isabell lingered in the court for many years as the justices tried in vain to reconcile the legal contradictions that had built up around the actual lives of Isabell and her relatives. The case, once again, unearthed the persistent tensions between the legal framework of slavery and the personal importance of genealogy that had haunted the Colemans’ legal history since Robin v. Hardaway. The court's discussion in Pegram v. Isabell reflected significant discomfort with the admissibility of slave claims to genealogy. In fact, the debate reflected an almost willful denial of slave family ancestry as the court placed intense doubt upon the legitimacy of Isabell's personal history. Rather than accept slave genealogy as authoritative, the court focused their concern on technical points of evidence with a myopic scrutiny of procedural issues that rendered Isabell's claims to Indian ancestry largely moot.

By the early nineteenth century, the courts would institutionalize their suspicion of slave claims to family history and ancestry. The case of Pegram v. Isabell played an important role in this transition. The point of contention in the case was the fact that Isabell's mother, Nanny, won her freedom against Stephen Mayes by default: Mayes did not contest the action. As such, there was very little testimony taken in Nanny v. Mayes to prove that the plaintiff was descended from a maternal Indian ancestor. The evidence that did exist, the court argued, was vague and unreliable. In the original District Court trial, Isabell's lawyer, George Keith Taylor, presented Nanny's legal victory as the primary evidence of his client's freedom. Nanny's legal emancipation, Taylor argued, was proof that her daughter was free as well.

The court did not consider this adequate proof and requested direct testimony of Isabell's Indian ancestry. In the appeal, Taylor tried in vain to find a living witness to testify on behalf of Isabell's Indian ancestry, but was unable to find anyone. When Pegram v. Isabell reached the court in 1807, Francis Coleman, who provided testimony in many related freedom suits, was no longer alive. In the absence of a living witness, Taylor presented Francis Coleman's 1799 deposition from Nanny v. Mayes that claimed Isabell's mother “descended according to general reputation, in the maternal line, from an Indian ancestor.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The court expressed doubts about accepting the hearsay evidence of a dead man. Although eighteenth-century courts had long accepted hearsay evidence in slave freedom claims, they began to question this practice by the early nineteenth century. In Pegram v. Isabell, the court was wary of accepting the second-hand deposition of “a very old man” who could only report the “general reputation” of Nanny's Indian ancestry.Footnote ⁸⁷ Judge St. George Tucker argued that such evidence was necessary. Hearsay evidence was always important in slave cases, he explained, because no institutional records such as marriage registries existed to record “pedigree.”Footnote ⁸⁸ But his comments did not necessarily reflect those of the rest of the court. When they first heard the case in 1807, they worried that admitting flimsy evidence might set a dangerous precedent that could embolden designing abolitionists. A misguided judgment might create opportunities for “a person anxious to give freedom to slaves . . . to recover a judgment by default.”Footnote ⁸⁹ If the court made a bad decision based on second-hand hearsay evidence, they explained, “the consequences would be fatal.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Instead, they granted a new trial for the following year.

The court's reservations over hearsay evidence reflected an emerging trend among Virginia jurists to discount indirect or second-hand accounts of slave family genealogy. Faced with popular anxieties over the security of institutionalized slavery in the early nineteenth century, the court placed an increasingly onerous burden of proof on slaves claiming freedom through ancestry. As historian Duncan MacLeod explains, nineteenth-century judges presiding over freedom suits gradually replaced historical tolerance for circumstantial claims with adherence to strict legality. By the 1820s, he notes, retrenchment into strict legalism was effectively complete and hearsay evidence became largely inadmissible.Footnote ⁹¹

The issues raised in the retrial of Pegram v. Isabell facilitated this shift. Rather than consider family history as evidence, the court evaluated how this suit might damage property rights. The justices considered how the primacy of property rights for slaveholders outweighed the abstract commitment to freedom. Judge William Fleming explained that whereas “laws should literally be construed in favour of the rights of freedom . . . the rights of property ought to be respected and preserved.”Footnote ⁹² Reflecting considerable consternation over property rights in the face of Isabell's claim to Indian ancestry, however, he admitted “it is perhaps attended with difficulty to draw the true line of distinction between them.”Footnote ⁹³

Alongside the issue of property, the court asserted that the legal authority of racial categories trumped slave claims to ancestry. In his discussion of the evidence in Pegram, Judge Spencer Roane objected to the lack of racial “data” in the testimony provided. He cited earlier precedents by which hearsay evidence about ancient ancestors included information about “the appearance of the persons in question, which afforded data whereby the Jury and Court were respectively enabled to decide whether they were Indians or not.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Neither Nanny nor Isabell, he suggested, provided suitable evidence about how “Indian” their ancestor looked. Racial categories determined by the court provided far more solid evidence than slave family claims to their own history.

The court, again, could not make a decision in this case and ordered a new trial. They were unable—or, rather, unwilling—to make a decision based on the evidence at hand. At the same time, they were not willing to wrongfully deny the plaintiff her freedom if it was so deserved. The court suggested that slaves could still win their freedom in court provided that they could produce the right kind of evidence. The kinds of evidence that proved freedom in slave suits during the eighteenth century were no longer admissible. By the nineteenth century, the courts had largely stripped slaves of their ability to rely on family history. In place of such evidence, they required slave plaintiffs to produce evidence based on racial “data” and direct testimony.

Caty v. Wyche (1819)

For families like the Colemans, such evidence was increasingly hard to come by. However, as the legal system tightened the rules and requirements for freedom, the doggedly persistent Coleman family plodded forward, largely under the radar of historical memory. Isabell's sister, Caty, relentlessly pursued her freedom in Brunswick County for 16 years. As the years dragged on, all parties involved in Caty v. Wyche grew weary. In 1818, an exhausted Williamson Coleman begged the court to excuse him and Elizabeth Pegram from responding to yet another subpoena. He pleaded, “I think it entirely useless for me to attend [the next court session], as I have been unwell for some time … also Elizabeth Pegram who is 80 years of age who I am certain will not go.”Footnote ⁹⁵

In the end, Caty out-litigated, or, at least, outlasted them all and won her freedom. She finally gained her freedom in 1819. On September 27, 1819, Caty's name appears on the Register of Free Negroes for Brunswick County. The entry states, “Caty a woman, about forty years of age, light complexion Five feet one and a half Inches high . . . recovered her freedom in Brunswick Superior Court at September term 1819 of John Wyche.”Footnote ⁹⁶ After 16 years of litigation, it was, perhaps, with a mixed sense of pride and solemnity that she was able to finally register her name in the county records as a free woman.

By the time Caty won her freedom, well over a century had passed since a Virginia slaveholder first purchased her maternal Indian ancestor, Judith. Caty's age of forty meant that she was born near 1779, not long after Hannah Coleman first charted new legal territory in Robin v. Hardaway. Through multiple generations, the Coleman family witnessed enormous transformations: colonial turmoil, the American Revolution, national expansion, and the consolidation of a legal regime that secured white power by systematically denying the validity of family histories like their own. As legal regimes changed around them, however, the Coleman family adapted to new circumstances in their singular pursuit of freedom. Since Bob Coleman first ran away from John Hardaway in 1771, time and time again, the Coleman family forced their own ideas about race and ancestry on the world around them. Creatively, they used the resources at their disposal. Bob Coleman used his feet. In 1772, Hannah Coleman used the courts. Caty Coleman used the fraught legal legacy of law and genealogy that had sustained her family's pursuit of freedom for multiple generations. In their many adaptations, the Coleman family experience echoed a long history of colonized people who used the tools of their oppressors to create acts of resistance.

Perhaps their clearest adaptive act of resistance was the preservation of the Coleman name itself. For well over a century, the Colemans were able to quietly nurture a common surname within a system of slavery that institutionally denied enslaved people family identity. Their commitment to the Coleman name suggests that they understood that Anglo-Americans manifested power by legitimizing their families as a means to securing the privileges of race with the authority of law. The Colemans preserved their family name despite lawmakers’ efforts to deny their ancestry. When Caty's daughter registered her freedom with Brunswick County in 1829, for example, she documented both her last name and her mother's legal victory in the permanent record. Born in the early years of her mother's legal crusade, “Fanny Coleman” registered herself as “a free woman . . . about twenty two years of age . . . one of the children of Caty who recovered her freedom from John Wyche.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, when Caty's son, “Green Coleman,” registered his freedom in 1831, he, too, noted his surname and identified himself as “one of the children of Caty who recovered her freedom.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Fanny and Green Coleman registered their full names and their mother's legal victory as evidence of their status as free people. In doing so, they became part of a long family tradition that rooted their connections to one another through shared genealogy and collective legal struggle. They lay claim to the very things that the system of slavery tried to deny them—a legal history and a family name.