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.