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  • The American Scholar

    PROGRESS REPORT

    Dec 02, 2019 4 minutes
    BY REBECCA McCARTHY

    Fighting for Freedom

    In the late 1700s, enslaved people in America tried to gain their freedom by a revolutionary means: suing for it in court. More than 500 “freedom suits” were filed in Washington, D.C., and Maryland from 1790 until the Civil War, and about half of them were successful.

    “African-American families were laying claim to freedom, and they were using law to challenge slavery,” says William G. Thomas III, a history professor at the University of Nebraska who is at work on a book about those lawsuits, to be called Out of the Vineyard.

    Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Thomas and

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