The colonial era Northampton County court records tell a fascinating story of a woman named Jane Webb. Born of a white mother, she was a free mulatto, formerly called Jane Williams. In 1704, Jane Webb had “a strong desire to intermarry with a certain negro slave … commonly called and known by the name of Left.” Webb informed Left’s owner Thomas Savage, a gentleman of Northampton County, of her desire to marry Left and made an offer to Savage. She would be a servant of Savage’s for seven years and would let Savage “have all the children that should be bornd [sic] upon her body during the time of [Jane’s] servitude,” but for how long the children were to be bound is not clear. In return, Savage would allow Jane Webb to marry his slave, and after Jane’s period of servitude ended, Savage would free Left. Also, neither Savage nor his heirs could claim any child born to Jane Webb and Left after her period of servitude. Savage agreed to Jane Webb’s offer, and an agreement was written and signed by both parties.

Jane Webb fulfilled her part of the agreement and served Savage for seven years. During that time, she had three children by her husband Left—Diana or Dinah Webb, Daniel Webb, and Francis Webb. After she completed her term of service in 1711, Jane Webb “in a kindly manner” demanded her husband from Savage as well as her children. Apparently, Jane Webb and Savage were at odds on how long the children she bore during her servitude were supposed to be bound to him, and Savage refused to free Left and the children. In April 1711, Savage submitted a letter to the county court of Northampton requesting that Jane Webb’s children be bound to him and his heirs, to which the court agreed.

Eleven years later, Jane Webb filed a petition with the court pleading to the justices to free her children. Webb pointed out to the court her agreement with Savage and beseeched the court that the “children being born in lawful wedlock may not be judged to servitude.” She prayed that the court would not “enslave your petitioner’s children born as aforesaid.” Thomas Savage was unable to, or refused to, appear in court to answer Webb’s petition. On one occasion, he informed the court that he was too sick to attend, and so, the case was continued until the next term, and the next term, and the next term, until it was finally dismissed by the court. Reason given? “Plaintiff’s argument dismissed as frivolous.”

In February 1725, Thomas Savage petitioned the court to have two of Jane’s children, born after Jane completed her term of service, to be bound to him. When you read the petition you will notice that part of it has been marked out. Fortunately, one can make out the words: “…the said Jane hath two children named Lisha & Abimelech the former of which hath long lived with your Petitioner but hath lately been decoyd [sic] away from your Petitioner’s house & is detaind [sic] by her said mother from your Petitioner.” Since Jane had no means to support the children, “they may be induced to take ill courses,” and for that reason, Savage argued that he, and not their mother, had the best right to the children. Savage’s action was in violation of their 1701 agreement as understood by Jane Webb; however, Savage claimed that 1701 agreement permitted him to bind any child born to Jane Webb and Left, even children born after Jane’s seven years of servitude. Savage never produced the agreement as evidence in the case, but he did provide two witnesses who informed the court that they had seen an indenture between Savage and Jane Webb in which “it was agreed that the said Jane was to serve seven years & all her children born in the lifetime of her husband Left should serve the said Savage.”

At the same time the court was hearing Savage’s petition, Jane Webb tried to win freedom for her husband and children in the chancery court. In March 1725, Webb filed her bill of complaint against Thomas Savage in which she recounted the agreement the two made and accused Savage of holding in bondage children born to her and her husband after 1711. She accused Savage of concealing the written agreement which made it difficult for her to prove her case in the previous suit. She asked the chancery court to issue a writ of subpoena to Savage “commanding him” to personally appear before the court to answer her complaint and produce the written agreement.

By July 1726, Savage had yet to respond to Jane’s complaint in the chancery court. On 12 July, the justices made their decision on Savage’s petition regarding Lisha and Abimilech. Both were bound to Savage. On that same day, Jane Webb was arrested on the charge of uttering dangerous words “tending to the breach of the peace” which was heard by several individuals. They swore “that the said Jane had declared that if all Virginia Negroes had as a good as heart as she had they would all be free.” The court ordered that she receive ten lashes “well laid” on her bare back at the whipping post and that it was to be done immediately.

Savage finally responded to Jane Webb’s bill of complaint in November 1726. He informed the court that he never consented to freeing Left and that the children born during and after Webb’s time of servitude were to be bound to him but he could not recall for how long. Once again, Savage did not produce the 1701 agreement. The court put the burden on Jane to produce the evidence on how long her children were to serve Savage. If she could not, the court would dismiss her bill. Jane appeared at the next court held in December 1726 with witnesses to give evidence on her behalf—African-American witnesses. None of the testimony exists because there was some confusion on the part of the court concerning whether the testimony of African-Americans should be admissible. The order book entry reads, “the court being divided about Negro evidence offered ordered the same to be referred to the next court.” In April 1727, the court ruled “that none such [Negro evidence] ought to be allowed.” With no evidence to support her complaint, Jane Webb realized she had no chance of winning her suit. She failed to appear in court the next time the case was heard in July 1727, and the court dismissed the case from the docket. Her husband Left remained a slave and all her children and, by now, grandchildren remained bound to Savage and his heirs.

To learn more stories like Jane Webb’s, visit the Library of Virginia’s latest exhibition You Have No Right: Law and Justice in Virginia, running 24 September 2012-18 May 2013

Information for this story was gathered from the following Northampton County Court Records found at the Library of Virginia:

Northampton County (Va.) Judgments, 1655-1816. Jane Webb versus Thomas Savage, 1723 January, Barcode number 1154682. Local Government Records Collection, Northampton Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

Northampton County Chancery Causes, 1721-1816. Jane Webb versus Thomas Savage, Northampton County Chancery Cause, 1727-001. Local Government Records Collection, Northampton Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

Northampton County (Va.) Criminal Causes, 1722-1799. Warrant for Jane Webb, 1726 July, Barcode number 1168307. Local Government Records Collection, Northampton Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

Northampton County (Va.) Judgments, 1655-1816. Petition of  Thomas Savage, 1726, Barcode number 1154685. Local Government Records Collection, Northampton Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

Northampton County Order Book No. 18, 1722-1729 (copy), Barcode number 1123591. Local Government Records Collection, Northampton Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

-Greg Crawford, Local Records Coordinator

A small slip of paper on display in the Library of Virginia’s latest exhibition You Have No Right: Law and Justice in Virginia, running 24 September 2012-18 May 2013, was of immense importance to twelve people. It discloses, even though it does not state the fact in so many words, that on 2 May 1772 they gained their freedom after being held in slavery since each of them was born. The piece of paper and the fates of those Virginians illuminates a disturbing and little-known part of Virginia’s history, the enslavement of American Indians.

The paper came into the possession of the Library of Virginia in 1988 when it acquired a copy of volume two of John Tracy Atkyns, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery in the Time of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke . . . (London, 1765–1768) that had once been in the library of the colonial government in Williamsburg. One of the librarians in the cataloguing section showed it to me, knowing of my interest in that library. When she lifted it from her desk to hand it to me, a piece of paper that had been slipped between leaves in the middle of the volume fell out and fluttered to the floor. We were surprised, and I was even more surprised when I saw what it was. It was a 1780s or 1790s copy of the judgment in Robyn v. Hardiway (or Robin, or Hardaway), an unusually important case decided in the General Court of Virginia. The librarian and I presented the judgment to the archivists who added it to the meager surviving records of the colonial General Court.

The court case had two parts. First, attorneys argued about whether a 1682 law that allowed for the lifetime enslavement of Indians imported from other colonies had been repealed in 1684, 1691, or 1705. For decades Virginia’s courts had assumed that the 1684 invalidated the 1682 law, and “under that persuasion,” one of the attorneys informed the court, “hundreds of the descendants of Indians have obtained their freedom, on actions brought in this court.” The court concluded the first part of the case by deciding that the 1682 law had remained in effect until 1705.  This decision enlarged the number of residents of Virginia who could not hope to gain their freedom by claiming to be descendants of Indian women illegally enslaved between 1684 and 1705.

A jury trial then established that the twelve people were descendants of an Indian woman who had been illegally enslaved. The jury awarded Robin, Hannah, Daniel, Cuffie, Isham, Moses, Peter, Judy, Autry, Silvia, Davy, and Ned, all of unstated age, one shilling in damages. Each received one penny, but each also received freedom.

Some excellent 21^st-century scholarship demonstrates that English-speaking Virginians enslaved many more Indian residents of Virginia in the 17^th century than earlier historians believed and that the enslavement may very well have taken place in spite of the laws or in the absence of laws governing the enslavement of Indians. Because almost all of the records of the colonial General Court burned in the fire that destroyed the state court house and much of the business district of Richmond in April 1865, the specific record of the outcome of the important 1772 freedom suit naming the persons freed is especially rare and valuable.

It was critically important that the twelve plaintiffs were descendants of “Indian women,” not of Indian men. In 1662 the Virginia General Assembly had passed a law that arose from a case that Elizabeth Key filed in the Northumberland County Court. She was the daughter of Thomas Key, a white man who had been a burgess in the 1630s, and one of his enslaved female laborers of African origin or descent. Elizabeth Key claimed her freedom as the daughter of a free man and won her case, but the assembly then changed the law. The act of 1662 explained that because “some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree” it declared “that all children borne in this country shalbe held bound or free only according to the condition of the mother.”

Two other pieces of paper on exhibition in You Have No Right demonstrate that descendants of enslaved Indian women continued to file freedom suits in Virginia courts well into the 19^th century. In May 1820, after seven years of tedious and delayed proceedings in the courts of Wythe and Powhatan Counties, Rachel Findlay won her freedom for the second time. When she was a girl in 1773, one year after the General Court issued its judgment in Robyn v. Hardiway, the court ruled that she and her family, too, were entitled to their freedom as descendants of an illegally enslaved Indian woman. But her owner, who lived in the part of Cumberland County that in 1777 became Powhatan County, sold rather than freed her. She lived in slavery in far-away Wythe County for forty years until learning in 1813 that she should have been freed in 1773.

When the Powhatan County Court finally issued its ruling in the May 1820 judgment Rachel vs. John Draper, Sr. that Rachel Findlay was a free person, she was an old woman with thirty or forty descendants, all of whom had lived all of their lives in slavery and should have always lived free. It is not known whether any or all of her children and grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren ever learned that they, too, should have been living in freedom and not in slavery since their births or whether any of them actually became free as a result of her persistent pursuit of her law suit. A court judgment was not self-enforcing, especially for a group of people like Rachel Findlay’s descendants who probably lived in wide dispersion, perhaps some of them outside of Virginia. Some of them may have lived the remainder of their lives in slavery, too, as she did for forty-seven years.

About the time that Rachel Findlay won her freedom for the second time, members of the Evans family lost a freedom suit in Lynchburg in Charles Evans, etc. vs. Lewis B. Allen, 1821-033. Their story is truly tragic. In preparation for their case, members of the family or perhaps their court-appointed attorney compiled and submitted to the court a genealogical chart that demonstrated how the family members were related to one another. That sheet of paper is also on display in the Library of Virginia’s exhibition and together with other evidence might have persuaded a court that they were entitled to their freedom. However, their attorney, former Congressman Christopher Henderson Clark, had a stroke sometime in 1820 and failed to appear in court on behalf of his clients. As a consequence of the case not being presented when scheduled, the court dismissed it in 1821, leaving all of the people and the descendants of the females stuck in slavery for the remainder of their lives.

Slavery and the laws that created and protected it were cruel and unjust. Adding to the cruelty and injustice were the many unpredictable factors, like the illness of an attorney, that could prevent people from presenting their cases in court, or like the sale of Rachel before she could become free. It is now clear that colonial Virginians enslaved more Indians than historians once knew about, and it is evident that many more people had been illegally enslaved than historians once believed. Men, women, and children of African, American Indian, and also of European and mixed ancestry like Elizabeth Key fell victim to the system of slavery that sustained Virginia’s economy and society from the early years of the colonial period to the end of the American Civil War.

It is also now convenient for the first time to do thorough research on some of the freedom suits that people filed after the American Revolution. People who filed suits seeking freedom and alleging illegal enslavement often sought justice through local courts of chancery. The record of each surviving court case contains unique personal stories about the enslavement of one or more Virginians and the conditions under which they lived and how they attempted to gain their freedom. As part of the Library of Virginia’s project to preserve and make available to researchers the records of the commonwealth’s local chancery courts, archivists at the library have to date digitized thousands of case files containing several million pages of documents, including more than one hundred freedom suits. They are processing and digitizing more every day. The records of the cases that have been digitized can be viewed online in the Chancery Records Index.

Clerks of court did not know or use the surnames of the people who filed freedom suits, so to identify freedom suits it is necessary to search for chancery causes in which the style, or title, of the case does not include a surname. In the search field for the surname for the plaintiff(s), simply enter a tilde ~ which will return a list of cases in which the surname of the plaintiff is not part of the official name of the case.

-Brent Tarter, Founding Editor of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography