“Freedom By A Judgment”: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family |
“Freedom By A Judgment”: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family
Law and History Review
Volume 30, Issue 1 (February 2012)
pages 173-203
DOI: 10.1017/S0738248011000642
Honor Sachs, Assistant Professor of History
Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina
Forum: Ab Initio: Law in Early America
On May 2, 1771, John Hardaway of Dinwiddie County, Virginia posted a notice in the Virginia Gazette about a runaway slave. The notice was ordinary, blending in with the many advertisements for escaped slaves, servants, wives, and horses that filled the classified section of the Gazette in the eighteenth century. Like countless other advertisements posted in newspapers wherever slaves were held, Hardaway’s advertisement read: “Run away from the subscriber, a dark mulatto man slave named Bob Colemand, 25 years old, tall, slim, and well made, wears his own hair pretty long, his foretop combed very high, a blacksmith by trade, claimed his freedom under pretense of being of an Indian extraction.”
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Tags: Honor Sachs, Law and History Review, Virginia