Freedom Suits, African American Women, and the Genealogy of Slavery

Abstract

AT various times during 1792 and 1793, Anne Brown, a free person of color, gave four sworn depositions before Annapolis alderman and mayor John Bellum concerning a large group of slaves filing freedom suits in the Maryland General Court of the Western Shore. The daughter of Mary Brown, known as Mulatto Moll, Anne Brown had grown up in the Swamp, located about twenty miles south of the city in Anne Arundel County (Figure I). Her mother was an indentured servant to “old Robert Lockwood,” who owned four slaves and a small farm. As a child she and her mother and her sister Mary Batson lived on the same farm as Lenah, one of Lockwood’s slaves, the only daughter of Maria, who had arrived with her young daughter in Maryland about 1686 on a ship. Anne’s mother had told her many times that Lenah’s mother “was to be free and was a Spanish woman.”1 She never heard any old person in the Swamp say that Lenah’s mother was a slave. Anne’s depositions became part of the evidence in sixteen freedom suits filed by members of the Boston family, who traced their roots back to Maria. How and why the slaves took this surname is not clear, but it was almost certainly used by Lenah and her ten children early in the eighteenth century (Figure II). As the suits progressed, twentyfour other witnesses provided testimony, many of them on behalf of the slave-owning defendants, but none of them were deposed more than twice, except for Anne, who was called on to give testimony a total of six times, including two depositions in 1795 and 1797, the last coming at age sixty-six after the suits were appealed to the Maryland High Court of Appeals.2