Enslavement and the Appellate Courts: A Dataset of Northern and Free State Legal Decisions from 1784 to 1875

Dataset CreatorsBret Bicoy, Michigan State University College of Law, 2023Anna Maxwell, Michigan State University College of Law, 2025Nina Jeffries, Duke University School of Law, 2026Justin Simard, Michigan State University College of LawContributorsLindsey SimardThis dataset of published appellate court decisions involving enslaved people in northern states reveals the extensive involvement of northern courts in slavery.1 It provides information about the names of enslaved people involved in the decisions, the legal subject matter of the decisions, the courts and states where courts decided the cases, the number of times that decisions have been cited by later courts, and links to full-text copies of each case. This article is the first of several regional datasets developed by our research team at the Citing Slavery Project.2 Our goal is to help legal professionals, historians, family genealogists, and others identify decisions that involve enslaved people, highlight the information they provide about enslaved people, and track their legal influence.This dataset reflects slavery’s economic and political importance and the involvement of northern courts and lawyers in slavery. It also shows that even after northern states began the process of emancipation, their courts continued to resolve disputes involving enslaved people, as legal enslavement persisted for decades under drawn-out manumission schedules. The decisions collected include both criminal and civil suits. Enslaved people sometimes appear as litigants fighting for their freedom but appear more frequently in disputes between enslavers in which they are treated as property rather than people.In addition to providing data about the judicial system’s involvement in slavery, this dataset illustrates how courts and the law shaped the lives of enslaved people; it highlights the varying contexts in which enslaved people encountered the law. For example, enslaved people experienced commercial law firsthand as disputed items of property and also used the legal system to gain freedom and to defend themselves from attempts of re-enslavement.Although courts drafted these decisions to justify the outcomes of legal disputes, the decisions also provide information about the lives of individual enslaved people. Almost half (139) of the decisions in this dataset contain the name of at least one enslaved person. Even when the enslaved people involved in the decisions remain unnamed, they provide information about them that might make them identifiable. For example, the decisions include the names of the enslavers, as well as the counties, towns, and other regional information, all of which could be used in family genealogies or other research.3 These decisions also provide more general information about the personal lives and legal interactions of enslaved people.This dataset tracks how often later courts cited these decisions, demonstrating how cases generated by slavery have shaped the law. In the United States common law system, which relies on precedent to define legal rights, decisions in prior cases influence future legal outcomes.4 Legal scholars justify precedent by arguing that it ensures fair, consistent, and “correct” legal outcomes.5 Citations allow judges to “harness authority of the past” and bring an “aura of authority” to judicial decisions.6 Citations therefore play an important role in legal decision-making.Judges have treated most of the decisions in this dataset as though they fit into standard legal categories. These “standard” categories, for example, frequently describe the law of contracts and bequests of property, both of which are areas of law that maintained their importance after abolition. Although such decisions have often received less attention than freedom suits and fugitive slave cases, the dataset suggests that they were more common.7 Because judges classified these cases into traditional legal categories, they have served as precedent for decisions not involving enslaved people.8 This means that modern judges continue to rely on cases grounded in the logic of a slave society to support modern legal decisionmaking. In total, the decisions in the dataset have been cited at least 3,704 times by other United States courts in published decisions.Researchers compiled the dataset using commercially available legal databases that provide access to published American case law. The legal databases contain decisions from state and federal appellate courts. Researchers searched each northern state’s case law for the word “slave” and other synonyms. The results from the keyword search were then filtered down by jurisdiction and date. Researchers then reviewed each of the filtered results and included those in our dataset that involved an enslaved person. The citation data was gathered using the legal database’s citation functions. This dataset is part of the larger Citing Slavery Project, in which the research team is collecting published decisions involving enslaved people in every United States jurisdiction.This dataset is also important because it lists decisions that include narrative information about enslaved people. It provides information about the lives of individual enslaved people that might not otherwise be accessible and also provides information about the social and legal conditions of slavery more generally. Although our dataset provides important information about the lives of the enslaved, it relies on decisions drafted by judges for other purposes. Their decisions often treat enslaved people as property and tell incomplete—and likely misleading—stories about their lives. These narrations were written by white judges who legitimized the treatment of people as property and perpetuated white supremacy. For example, Arabas v. Ivers, 1 Root 92 (Conn. 1784), was a case about Jack. In the decision, the court’s language was brief and oversimplified, and it downplays an unjust, terrifying, and cruel situation. From the case, it is known that Jack had served in the Continental Army, after which, Ivers, an enslaver, kidnapped and imprisoned him. Upon a habeas petition, the court held that Jack was a free man because of his service in the Continental Army. The entire decision is below: A person illegally imprisoned may be discharged upon a habeas corpus.The case was–Jack was a slave to Ivers, and enlisted into the continental army with his master's consent–served during the war, and was discharged. Ivers claimed him as his servant; Jack fled from him to the eastward, Ivers pursued him, and took him and brought him to New Haven on his return to New York, where he belonged, and for safe-keeping while he stayed at New Haven, he got the gaoler to commit Jack to prison; and upon Jack's application to the court, complaining of his being unlawfully and unjustly holden in prison, the court issued a habeas corpus, to bring Jack before the court; also ordering the gaoler to certify wherefore he held Jack in prison; which being done, Ivers was cited before the court; and upon a summary hearing, Jack was discharged from his imprisonment, upon the ground that he was a freeman, absolutely manumitted from his master by enlisting and serving in the army as aforesaid.9Like Arabas, the judicial opinions in our dataset tell incomplete stories. In many cases, even when enslaved people “win,” the courts still treat them as property by using dehumanizing language and perpetuating the white supremacist assumptions of slavery. Nevertheless, we hope that our dataset encourages scholars to pursue scholarship about the lives of enslaved people, while being mindful of the limitations of judicial decisions as a source. By providing access to legal decisions about enslaved people that are otherwise hidden behind paywalls or buried in disparate archives, our dataset (and the Citing Slavery Project more generally) aims to allow historians, genealogists, and families to learn more about law in a slave society.10 We also hope that legal professionals will use this information to understand the context from which these cases arise. The dataset serves as a starting point for further research into the broad set of decisions in which enslaved people were involved.2020–2025EnglishCalifornia, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin1784–1875Civil Document; Criminal DocumentWestlaw, https://westlaw.com/LexisNexis, https://www.lexisnexis.com/This dataset was created by searching two commercial legal databases: Thompson Reuters Westlaw (Westlaw) and LexisNexis (Lexis). Westlaw and Lexis are repositories of digitized decisions, law review articles, treatises, books, news articles, and other material used in legal research. They also contain nearly complete collections of published American judicial decisions. In these published decisions, courts typically recite background facts relevant to the legal issue, discuss principles of law, and then apply the legal principles to the relevant facts to reach a conclusion.The decisions collected by commercial legal databases were originally compiled and published in reporters. Decisions are generally first published in a state or regional reporter–which are official publications of court decisions–before being added onto the commercial database. Each decision can be identified by its abbreviated name and its unique volume and page number identifier. Fig. 1 shows an example of an electronic scan from the printed copy of Arabas v. Ivers. This is a 1784 decision from the Connecticut Supreme Court.For this database, researchers gathered case information state by state. For each state, researchers used search terms to find all decisions before 1876 that included the words “slave” or “negro,” using root expanders (slave! negro!). Researchers excluded United States Supreme Court decisions, which were collected separately. After this list of decisions was generated, researchers read each decision to determine if it fell in our definition of a “slave case.” We defined “slave cases” as decisions where an enslaved person was either a party to the case or was otherwise involved in the legal dispute. In most instances, enslaved people appear as the property in dispute.Westlaw and Lexis digitize judicial decisions to create comprehensive databases that are full-text searchable. Below is an example of digitized decision from Westlaw, marked up to show how researchers recorded and collected data.Decisions in which enslaved people are not themselves part of the legal issues or a party to the suit are not included in the dataset. For example, decisions where slavery was used as an analogy, or in which an enslaved person was mentioned but was not directly relevant to the legal issues in the case, do not fall under our definition of a “slave case.” Although such decisions are not included in this dataset, they are important and worthy of further study. In the Limitations and Areas for Future Research section below, we have broadly categorized some of these in the hopes of jumpstarting further research.If a decision qualifies as a “slave case,” it is included in the dataset with the following columns:Full Case Name: Names of the decision in full (ex. Catharine Linda v. Erastus D. Hudson). Transcribed from the case name listed by the reporter.Short Case Name: Abbreviated name of the decision (ex. Linda v. Hudson) Transcribed from the short case name listed by the reporter.Case Citation: Legal citation to the decision, following the format prescribed in The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. Transcribed from the opinion. The format is volume number, abbreviated journal name, and the first page of the decision. Older citations are not always unique, where a single citation may lead to more than one decision.Year: Year that the case was decided. Transcribed from the opinion.State: State where the case was decided. Generated using the location of the court that issued the opinion. Transcribed from the opinion.Court: Name of the court which decided the case. Transcribed from the opinion.Degree of Involvement: Each decision is designated as either a “direct” or “indirect” slave case. This classification describes the degree to which the enslaved person was involved in the decision.11Direct Cases: decisions where the body of an enslaved person is at issue. This includes: Contracts for enslaved persons (recovery for fraud in bill of sale, etc.): E.g., Livingston v. Ackeston, 5 Cow. 531 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1826) (holding that Livingston did not owe Ackeston any wages because there was no implied contract for wages, given that Livingston purchased Ackeston as if he were enslaved, despite him being a free man).Wills, estates, trusts, and other divisions of property which include enslaved people: E.g., Concklin v. Havens, 12 Johns. 314 (N.Y. Ch. 1815) (holding that a will stating “I give my negro woman, Maria . . . and her daughter Cloe, during her natural life” frees Chloe at the end of Maria’s natural life).E.g., Whitehill v. Wilson, 3 Pen. E.g., Anderson v. Millikin, 9 Ohio St. 568, 568 (Ohio 1859) (holding that “Persons having a of but a of white or being more white than can after the of the state’s v. (Pa. 1837) (holding that a free Black man not have the to in involving the rights of other people of v. 1 (Pa. (holding that free can under a state v. between slavery when if a American child who was not on the was to a of that about and v. (Pa. (holding that the with enslaved person referred to as a could not be to the without a prior judicial of v. of W. 12 1815) (discussing obligations of to for in support of a Black referred to as a not an enslaved v. 14 to create a which will put an end to negro slavery in this be held to be a for State University College of State University