A Promise Made in Philadelphia

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Before dawn on November 5, 1784, a young man named Jack White, as he called himself, stepped out of a windowless slave cabin, put on a new pair of shoes, and headed east: toward the James River and a place called Curles. It was a place where he was known by name, where a legal promise had been made, and broken, five years before he took that first step toward the rising sun. The promise had been signed in Philadelphia: Charles and Mary Logan, on their wedding day at the High Street Meeting House, pledged to free the slaves she had inherited as soon as the law allowed. The law changed. They refused. And so people like Jack White took action, absenting himself from Logan's plantation while Robert Pleasants, a Quaker antislavery activist in Virginia, pursued moral suasion and eventually litigation in the Virginia Court of Appeals as Pleasants v. Pleasants (1799). The story begins, in a sense, at Stenton, in James Logan's house, before it begins on that Virginia plantation. Charles Logan was his grandson.

"Without Any Shadow of Claim": The Enslaved People Who Litigated Pleasants v. Pleasants is the working title for William Fernandez Hardin's manuscript. It argues that the enslaved people at the heart of the case knew they had a legal right to freedom and actively campaigned, individually and collectively, to get that right recognized. Well before the case reached a lawyer or a judge, it had been actively litigated as a matter of private law, through legal norms, precedents, and gestures, in the years between the promise and the verdict.

"Without Any Shadow of Claim" builds on previous research. Litigating the Lash, Hardin's dissertation, focused on Robert Pleasants, an eighteenth-century Quaker antislavery activist who sued his family and won freedom for over four hundred enslaved people in a major court case argued by John Marshall, future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and ultimately decided by his republican antagonist Spencer Roane of the Virginia Court of Appeals. "This Unpleasant Business," Hardin's article in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, focused on the slaveholding members of the Pleasants family, many of them former Quakers, who opposed Robert Pleasants in the litigation before the case went to trial. "Without Any Shadow of Claim" tells it from a third angle, the one that has not yet been told: the enslaved people themselves.

Pleasants v. Pleasants is usually told as a story about Quaker antislavery principle and the frustrating limits of antislavery law in the post-Revolutionary era. The culmination of a research program that has already produced a dissertation focused on Robert Pleasants and a published article on the slaveholding family members who opposed him, this manuscript reclaims the case for the people at its center: the men, women, and children who understood what had been promised, who acted on that understanding long before any court gave them leave to do so, and whose names the historical record has too long left in the margins.

About the speaker: William Fernandez Hardin is a historian of early America whose work centers the legal experiences of enslaved people in the Revolutionary and early national periods. His article 'This Unpleasant Business': Slavery, Law, and the Pleasants Family in Post-Revolutionary Virginia appeared in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. He received his Ph.D. in History from Vanderbilt University and J.D. from American University in Washington, D.C. He teaches history at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee.