Seeking Justice: The Long Legal Struggle of an Enslaved Virginia Family

Before the Civil War brought emancipation to the South, some enslaved people managed to use the legal system— the same system that perpetuated their bondage — to sue for their freedom from owners who unlawfully held them in slavery. Daniel Thorp will tell the story behind Unis v. Charlton’s Administrator, one of the most extensive freedom suits in American history. It began when a woman, known only as Flora, was taken from Massachusetts and sold into slavery in Virginia. Forty years later, her children sued on the grounds that she had been kidnapped, and over the next thirty years four cases involving almost fifty plaintiffs moved through the Virginia court system before finally reaching a conclusion in 1855.

Dr. Daniel B. Thorp is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech. He is the author of several books, including In the True Blue’s Wake: Slavery and Freedom among the Families of Smithfield Plantation; Facing Freedom: An African American Community in Virginia from Reconstruction to Jim Crow; and Seeking Justice: The Extraordinary Freedom Suits of an Enslaved Virginia Family.