 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this virtual book talk with William G. Thomas III, author of A Question of Freedom, The Families Who Challenge Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Friday, December 4th, at 3 p.m., Grant S. Quatermus will tell us about his new book, A Georgetown Life, The Reminiscences of Britannia Wellington, Peter Kennan. Quatermus sheds light on life in the oldest neighborhood in the nation's capital through the story of Kennan, who lived at Tudor Place for over 90 years. On Monday, December 7th at noon, author Larry Tai charts the legacy of Joe McCarthy in his new book Demagogue, The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. Joining Larry Tai for the discussion will be Don Richie, former Senate historian. To do in-depth research and archives is to embark on a sort of treasure hunt. Instead of gold or gems, we search for bits of information, pieces of evidence that, when strung together, fill out the story of a person, a family, a community. To write A Question of Freedom, William Thomas has mined the riches of court records to draw out a fascinating and enlightening chronicle of a 70-year fight for liberty. Five generations of enslaved families in Prince George's County, Maryland, brought suit after suit against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. The records have preserved the memory of their fight for justice, and among the billions of pages within the National Archives and other research institutions are countless more stories to be told. William G. Thomas III is the John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Nebraska. He was co-founder and director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. He is a Lincoln Prize Laureate in 2001 for the Valley of the Shadow Project with Edward Ayers and Ann Rubin, and with them was awarded the James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association in recognition of the project as an outstanding contribution to the teaching of history. At the University of Nebraska, he has been the recipient of several fellowships and grants, and in 2013, he was appointed the American Historical Association member of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission here at the National Archives. Thomas' current research focuses on the History Harvest, a digital history project aimed at digitizing the nation's family and community history. Now let's hear from Professor Thomas. Thank you for joining us today. Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here today, and thank you for inviting me to the National Archives. I'd like to thank the Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, for his support, his encouragement, and the warm introduction. I want to say at the outset how important the work of archivists and librarians is in the preservation of and the access to historical records. This book would not have been possible without the work of the National Archives staff who indexed and compiled and arranged the records of the D.C. court so that scholars like me could work with them. And so I owe a great deal of thanks to the staff at the National Archives. Robert Ellis in particular helped me so much in the early going to understand the court records. And in getting ready for this talk today, I looked back at my first archival poll at the National Archives, and it was 10 years ago in December of 2010. In a few minutes, I'll talk about what I found that day. A question of freedom is about the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, who filed hundreds of lawsuits for their freedom against a circle, a powerful circle, of slaveholders. The families took several of these freedom suits all the way to the Supreme Court. And over 70 years and across five generations, these lawsuits challenged the very legitimacy of slavery and put slavery and slaveholders, slaveholders personally, on trial. Nearly a decade ago, I had stumbled upon a reference to a Supreme Court case called Queen V. Hepburn. It's a widely cited decision by Chief Justice John Marshall that defined the hearsay rule in American law. But the case originated as a freedom suit by an enslaved woman. And Francis Scott Key was her attorney. I was intrigued and I went to the National Archives in Washington D.C. to find out what I could about the Queen case. So I pulled the original case files. And several things stood out to me as curious. Everyone seemed to have a connection to Prince George's County. And it was clear that there were suits by earlier generations of the family. And I began to wonder, what does it mean that the hearsay rule, something that we see often invoked on TV shows like Law and Order as an objection? That's hearsay, secondhand testimony that can't be admitted into court. It was first defined in a case brought by an enslaved woman suing for her freedom and for the freedom of her child. I did not know much about freedom suits. Dred Scott was one of the few freedom suits I knew about. That case was decided in 1857 and it denied Scott his freedom. And it's notorious. It's infamous in American history because it held that blacks could not sue and had no rights under the Constitution. The very existence of the Queen freedom suits showed that enslaved people had sued in U.S. courts long before Dred Scott. And to my surprise, there were hundreds of other freedom suits in the files of the Washington, D.C. courts. Many of them extending back to earlier lawsuits in Prince George's County, Maryland and in fact other counties along the western shore of Maryland. The Queen case that went to the Supreme Court capped four generations of freedom petitions by the family in Maryland. Other families, the Shorter's, the Mahoney's, the Butler's, the Duckets, the Bells, the Thomases filed dozens of freedom suits. And as I turned page after page in the vaulted reading room at the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue it dawned on me that the freedom suits told a stunning story of resistance to slavery and described a desperate battle between enslaved families and slave holders in the United States over the meaning of law, rights, and freedom. The story begins in Prince George's County and its nations founding it held more than 60% of its total population in bondage. In May 1789 a small group of Jesuit priests met for their annual business meeting at a plantation they called White Marsh. This White Marsh is in Prince George's County. There's another White Marsh, Maryland, north of Baltimore but this plantation was held by the Jesuits who had inherited it from a planter in Maryland named James Carroll. The Jesuits held more than 90 people in slavery at White Marsh. They had five other plantations in Maryland totaling more than 11,000 acres. They enslaved more than 1,400 men, women, and children over several decades. The Jesuits decided at the meeting in May of 1789 to use their proceeds from the plantations to found a college at Georgetown. They also resolved for the first time to start systematically selling people they thought too old to work. Edward Queen was 35 years old. His mother, Phyllis, was in her 70s. Charles Mahoney was 34. His aunts and uncles were older. Edward Queen and Charles Mahoney sued the Reverend John Ashton as a defendant slave holder. The Jesuit priest who personally oversaw White Marsh as its manager. He also represented the Jesuit private trust that held the enslaved families as their collective property. An entity that would soon be called the corporation of Roman Catholic clergymen of Maryland. A stunning contest unfolded in Maryland and Washington, D.C. as a result of these two cases. Challenging the very basis of slavery in American law. Charles Mahoney's case took 11 years, three jury trials, and two appeals before it was finally over. In its length, in its complexity, Mahoney V Ashton was like almost no other freedom suit in American history. The proceedings spanned the entire decade of the 1790s and turned on whether Mahoney's black ancestor came from England to Maryland as an indentured servant. And therefore, on whether the Somerset principle in English law made her a free person by definition because she set foot on English soil where slavery was not legally sanctioned. Now, if either or both of these families, the Queens and the Mahoney's, succeeded. Hundreds of relatives could gain their freedom whether they lived on the Jesuit plantations or not. And potentially, dozens of slaveholders across Maryland would be affected. Edward Queen won his freedom suit in May 1794. And in response, slaveholders across Maryland cracked down. Eventually, they would close the very court where Edward Queen won his freedom, the general court. After slaveholders cracked down, some of the Queens began to lose their freedom suits. 15 years later, Priscilla and Mina Queen made much the same argument Edward Queen did. But they brought their freedom petition in a new jurisdiction, a new court, the Circuit Court of Washington D.C., the District of Columbia. Priscilla Queen sued the Reverend Francis Neal. He was the president of Georgetown College, now a university. And Mina Queen sued John Hepburn. He was from Prince George's County. He had squandered his immense inheritance, gone bankrupt, and would fight tooth and nail to reclaim his wealth and his standing. In 1810, when Priscilla Queen and Mina Queen brought their cases in the D.C. Circuit Court, they had good reason to be optimistic about the outcome. After all, Edward Queen had won his case in Maryland, and several of their aunts and uncles and cousins had won cases in Prince George's County after Edward Queen did. They would use much of the same evidence that the earlier Queens had presented. And one of their relatives, Simon Queen, who was now a free man, would take the stand and testify for them. They would testify that their ancestor, Mary Queen, was a free woman. The same argument that Edward Queen had made in 1794. But they had other reasons to be optimistic when they brought this case in D.C. Their family's former attorney, Gabriel Duvall, had risen to become an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. And Duvall had agreed to testify as a witness for Mina Queen and Priscilla Queen at their freedom trials. Duvall was one of the most prominent political figures in the city of Washington, D.C., and he was going to take the stand for the Queens. And their lawyer was Francis Scott King, an ambitious, young, well-connected attorney on the city who had already made a name for himself in several high-profile cases. He'd already appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court. But that was not all. They had a deposition that included the direct words of their ancestor, Mary Queen. This would be the first case in which the Queens introduced this deposition. She had told a white man on the eastern shore of Maryland near, in Cecil County, her story, the story of her origins and her history and where she had come from and her freedom. And that deposition that included the direct words of Mary Queen included this statement. She said, I was born free. And she lived in Guayaquil in New Spain. That's in Ecuador today. And that she was taken from there to London. So she had spent time in London, set foot on English soil, and possibly under the Somerset principle, therefore was a free woman when she came to Maryland. So this was a crucial piece of evidence contained in a deposition that would be introduced in Mina Queen and Priscilla Queen's case in 1810. Again, this new evidence before the D.C. Court. Those words contained in that deposition should have cinched their argument. And the stakes were momentous. Of course, their freedom was on the line. And if the Queens could prove that their ancestor set foot in England, especially if they could establish that she came into Maryland before 1715 when the colony passed its first slave code, then they might be able to use the English precedents that declared slavery unlawful. What if the D.C. Court acknowledged those precedents at the trial for their freedom in 1810 when the deposition was introduced by Francis Scott Key, the judges disallowed it as hearsay. Mary Queen's words, the only ones ever recorded from her would not be heard in a U.S. court of law. The judges pronounced a rule, the hearsay rule, so knew that Francis Scott Key did not know how to react. They also held that the words of an ancestor held as a slave were not admissible as evidence in a freedom suit. Now hearsay had been allowed for decades in the Maryland courts in freedom suits. And the reasoning was simple. If a person's freedom was on the line, all manner of evidence should be heard. And without documentary records or testimony, even if it was hearsay, was the only way to prove one's ancestry. Mary Queen had passed down her story telling its essential details so that it might not be forgotten. And like links in a chain connected that story, chain by chain had been passed down through the generations. And despite the fact that the Jesuits had sent her away from White Marsh, sent her to the eastern shore to another plantation called Bohemia Manor, she had managed to tell her story to enough people, including her family and those she met, that it in fact had made it down through four generations and into the deposition of a corroborating white witness. Would it ever be heard in court? The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the slaveholders of Francis Neal and John Hepburn. John Marshall wrote the majority opinion, the ruling that hearsay was inadmissible. Gabriel Duvall, the associate justice on the Supreme Court who had once represented the Queens in the Maryland freedom suits, he did not recuse himself. He issued a stinging dissent in the case. And he said that disallowing the crucial oral testimony would make freedom suits based on ancestry, virtually impossible. The ruling, he said, pulled these claims up by the roots. Priscilla and Mina Queen remained in slavery. And so did their children. In the coming decades, other families would file hundreds of freedom suits in Washington DC, many of them based on technical violations in the law of slavery. And in the aftermath of Queen V. Hepburn, the Jesuits considered liberating the enslaved families they held in bondage. But they never acted. And eventually, in 1838, the Jesuits sold over 200 men, women, and children to sugar planters in Louisiana to shore up the finances of their struggling college at Georgetown. I wanted to understand, as I wrote this book, how slavery survived the American Revolution. It was an obvious contradiction, and it was a moral problem. And revolutionary Americans knew it. What I did not realize at first was that slavery was always a dubious institution in the law. It had been fought and contested in the law from the nation's founding and well before in English law. I wondered what the legal footing under slavery was exactly and how slavery was justified as a matter of law. But I was also concerned about some widely held ideas many Americans have about the founding. First, the revolution is often depicted as an inevitable flourishing of liberty, and slavery is often portrayed as incidental to both the revolution and the course of the nation's history, but the freedom suits told an entirely different story. Second, many American history textbooks, other than a few notable figures like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, in textbooks, slavery is described as an abstract institution, largely faceless and nameless, and families are almost never mentioned by name. But particular families experienced slavery. There was nothing abstract about it. And black Americans like the Queens and the Mahonis were at the center of the story of the American founding and of American freedom in a way we've not acknowledged. The important point here is that the freedom suits were not just one or two isolated incidents. Together they amounted to a concerted effort to bring the problem of slavery before the nation. They were coordinated by these families and within and among these families. And they were not coordinated by the attorneys. It's easy to think that the attorneys were bringing these freedom suits, but they weren't. The enslaved families were. Once I met with the descendants of these families, I wanted to tell the story in a way that made it clear that this history is still with us today, that this is palpably felt and experienced history. It affects real people, real families, who are their descendants. 200 years ago, events 200 years ago might as well be yesterday. They feel so proximate. I wanted readers to experience this connection to the past, this immediacy of these questions. And to recognize the legacies and the pain of slavery that is still felt. Charles Mahoney is a figure of immense political importance and heroism. And others too. Minoqueen, Priscillaqueen. At first, I missed this detail in the research. And I bring it up here because I think it's so very important. We don't have the words of Charles Mahoney in the record, but he was present in the depositions. He was present in the room, not only in the courtroom, but in every deposition that was taken by his attorneys, Gabriel DeVall and others. In a way, the silence in the archive was that his voice might not have been heard or made it in the archival record, but his presence was. He guided a 12-year legal battle. He found the witnesses. He personally traveled to Washington, D.C. to talk with white men and white women who knew his ancestors. And more than just about any other Marylander of his generation, he questioned the legitimacy of slavery based on the ideals of revolutionary equality and liberty. He was declared a free man in court in 1799. And then, in effect, that decision was reversed in 1802. In effect, he was re-enslaved and he negotiated for his freedom. And 10 years later, Charles Mahoney had saved enough to buy his own daughter and free her. This was a 25-year effort to claim his freedom and the freedom of his family. What I want to do now is share my screen with you and show a few quick images of this research and then take your questions and answers. Let me share my screen. This is the original petition filed by Francis Scott Key in the case of Mina Queen and her daughter, Louisa. And it's the very first document that I encountered at the National Archives related to these freedom petitions. And I think it's important because it, of course, begins to name the families and the people involved in these cases and clearly identify and put on trial the slaveholder, a certain John Hepburn of Washington County. So the Jesuits Basilica at White Marsh Plantation still stands today. This is the original part of the Basilica at Sacred Heart Church in Prince George's County right on the Patuxent River. Many of these freedom cases in Maryland were tried in the general court of the Western Shore. And the general court, I did not realize, met at the State House at Annapolis. And this diagram of the original State House at Annapolis before the renovations that have occurred since. But you can go there today at Annapolis and walk right up to this point. This is the Great Hall and the Rotunda at the State House, the old Senate and House chambers. And five and six here, this is where the court met. The bar was right here, number six. And number five, this is the bench. This is where the judges sat. And so when Edward Queen brought his freedom trial, his freedom suit in Annapolis, it was tried at the general court. And there would have been dozens, hundreds of people in this Great Hall. And he would have walked up these steps through the Great Hall under the Rotunda and to the bar with his attorneys. The important point here is that these freedom suits were public, they were widely seen and observed, and they were political events right in the center of the Capitol. The cases up and down the Western Shore of Maryland, in Prince George's, in Charles County, in St. Mary's County tell a story of the resistance to slavery by using the law. Using the law the slaveholders wrote, the law the slaveholders made to turn against the slaveholders and against enslavement as a condition in American life after the Revolution. Slaveholders resisted these cases at every turn. John Ashton took out ads to try to recover the Queens who, after a court decision in their favor, he had appealed the decision to the Court of Appeals in Maryland. But he says, they quitted me for no other reason but because they were not set free at the last court. And I've recognized for the setting, I could see that they did not forfeit their services nor lose any share of my authority over them before the trial. He did the same thing with regard to the Mahonis. Charles and Patrick Mahoney, who in 1799 would win their freedom in court, later having it reversed. Francis Scott Key, attorney for the Queens. And finally, the book chronicles all of the cases as they come into Washington, DC. And a whole second wave of freedom suits occurs in the District of Columbia. And I want to say just a few, make a few comments about those. And then we'll take questions in just a few minutes. The cases in Washington, DC often turned on technical violations of the law and on high-profile lawsuits, freedom suits, that enslaved people brought to raise the visibility of the claim to freedom that they were making. One of the most important, I think, was Charlotte Dupese against Henry Clay, the outgoing Secretary of State in 1829. He was the leader of the Whig Party. He was a perennial presidential candidate. And Charlotte Dupese sued for her freedom in 1829, a very high-profile case that tells us something about the way slaveholders reacted to these freedom suits. Charlotte grew up on the eastern shore of Maryland in Dorchester County. Her father was a free black man named George Stanley. And he was listed in 1790 as a free black man in the very first U.S. census. Her mother was enslaved. Eventually, Charlotte's father was able to purchase his wife's freedom and two of their children, but not Charlotte's freedom. Before he could do that, before he could save up enough money to purchase her freedom, she was sold and taken to Kentucky. In Kentucky, she met an enslaved man named Aaron Dupese. He was enslaved by Henry Clay. And Clay was Speaker of the House and eventually a Senator from Kentucky and the leading founder of the Whig Party and Secretary of State, and as I mentioned, a presidential candidate. Charlotte married Aaron Dupese and Clay took them both to Washington, D.C. When she was there, her family on the eastern shore numerous times, abolition ideas were circulating in D.C. And there's no question that both Charlotte and Aaron Dupese knew about the many freedom suits that enslaved people brought in the 18 teens and 1820s in Washington. In 1829, when Andrew Jackson won the presidency and Clay was in his final days as Secretary of State and about to return to Kentucky, this was when Charlotte sued for her freedom. And Clay's reaction was swift and merciless and uncompromising. He responded personally to the court and he said that she had no legitimate claim to freedom. He even blamed the freedom suit on his Jacksonian political enemies. He simply could not believe that Charlotte did this on her own. And in this presumption, he was no different from virtually all other slaveholders who were sued. Clay quickly found out that the man he bought Charlotte from had once promised her freedom. Together, they suppressed any testimony to that effect. And Charlotte lost her case. Clay ordered her back to Kentucky, but Charlotte refused to go. And so Henry Clay ordered his attorney to have her jailed in the D.C. jail. Imprisoned, Charlotte was eventually sent to New Orleans to attend to Clay's daughter's family. It would be years before she saw her own children. So the reprisals against enslaved men and women who sued were significant. And the slaveholders like Clay viewed freedom suits as an insult, a direct attack on their reputation, on their vaunted sense of personal honor and self-image. And their response was often like Clay's harsh and punitive. Now, early in the research, I found scattered evidence that my ancestors from Prince George's County, Maryland, the Ducats, were connected to this story and to the families who sued for freedom. And as the full extent of their involvement became apparent, I realized I would need to confront the meaning of this history in a direct, different, more personal way. I had set out to understand the contradiction of slavery and freedom in American history, only to find that some of my distant ancestors were at the heart of that contradiction. And so this book is part memoir, an account of my investigation into the parallel file of my family and its involvement in slavery and in the freedom suits. I met and talked with the descendants of the families who sued for freedom, including the descendants of those enslaved by my ancestors. And their stories are connected and woven into this narrative history of the freedom suits in American history and their significance. I'll pause and see if we have questions and turn it over to our moderator for questions at this point. So one question that's come up is there a reason why freedom suits are not taught in school as part of American history? Dred Scott is certainly taught in American history. But I think the reason it's not taught is simply that these stories have yet to be told fully and scholars of American history are writing about freedom suits. There are freedom suits in St. Louis, Missouri, in New Orleans, in Charleston, in Virginia, in the 1780s and 90s and beyond. So there were freedom suits all over the Atlantic world in this period. So scholars have been working on this, and I think as these stories come to light and are written about and brought forward, we do need to be teaching them in American history. I'd like to see certainly the Queen family freedom suit and the Mahoney family freedom suit present in American history textbooks because they were deeply significant and tell us about the way that enslaved people knew the law, knew what the Declaration of Independence meant, knew what the Constitution meant, and sought to hold the nation accountable to the ideals that were presented in those documents. How do I think this historical information can help us in 2020? Well, I think, first of all, that we need to acknowledge the full, complete history of the founding, the full and complete history of slavery in American society and law and life. And so what do we need to do? I think we need to know the history first. We're obligated to look into and understand and deepen our knowledge of this history, the full and complete history of the nation. And I think we need to acknowledge the way history has shaped our present circumstances. And then third, I think it will help us to connect with those affected by this history. Those are the steps. We need to know the history. We need to acknowledge the way that history has shaped our present circumstances. And we need to connect with those who are affected by history in this way and in other ways. Okay, another question. Were there freedom suits going on in other states? Yes, there were freedom suits in Virginia. There were freedom suits in Missouri. The Missouri Court Records Project has helpfully documented those and put almost all of them up online in the St. Louis Court Records Project. So you can find them. The ones in Washington, D.C. and in Maryland, we have placed online at EarlyWashingtonD.org. So all of those freedom suits are available for you to research and study and look into. There are freedom suits in most of the southern states. Okay, I want to thank everybody for listening and thank the National Archives for hosting this event and for having me on. I really appreciate it and I'm glad to be here. Thank you very much.