by Kelly L. Schmidt and Cecilia Wright. Last updated July 2022.
Now at this day come Louis A LaBeaume, Lewis T Labeaume, C Edmund Labeaume, Jonas Neuman, and Peter E Blow who are all personally known to the Court, and acknowledge the execution of a deed of emancipation in favour of a negro man named Samuel of the age of thirty eight years, and also comes William H Pritchartt, a credible witness duly examined under oath, and proves the execution by Theodore Labeaume also one of the grantors in said deed of said instrument.
St. Louis Circuit Court Record Book Vol. 16, December 4, 1845, p. 431, Missouri State Archives-St. Louis.
About the record
St. Louis Circuit Court Record Books document entries legally registering the emancipation of just under a thousand enslaved people in greater St. Louis between 1817 and 1865. Many of the emancipation records were formatted as shown in the image and quotation above.
These court-recorded emancipations convey information about transitional moments for Black St. Louisans from slavery to freedom. However, the emancipations registered in St. Louis’s Circuit court are far from all emancipations which took place in the greater St. Louis area. Many emancipations documented in private papers are not reflected in the Circuit Court Records. The registering of emancipations in the Circuit Court Record Books is also different from the formal deed of emancipation typically created upon the emancipation of an enslaved person, which often contains more detail about a person being emancipated, such as a physical description (biased to contain distinguishing features such as scars, birth marks, skin tone, height, and hair type so that white surveillors could associate the deed of emancipation with the emancipated person as proof of their freedom, and to ensure that one person was not using another’s emancipation record to pass for being free).
In most instances, the person who registered the emancipation of an enslaved person was also the person who had, to that point, enslaved them. Sometimes, however, the emancipator was a family member, friend, peer, or ally of the enslaved person who purchased them and then bought their freedom. Viewed together, the records reveal patterns about emancipations and emancipators, pointing toward stories of free Black families and people who had emancipated themselves subsequently helping to emancipate others, such as John and Mary Meachum, who helped buy the freedom of enslaved people.
John Berry Meachum had freed himself from slavery in Virginia, and later purchased the freedom of Mary and their children in Missouri. Together, the couple purchased enslaved people and took them into their home until they earned enough money to repay their purchase price. Sometimes, this arrangement could be fraught; in St. Louis Circuit Court records, one can find court records for people who had been laboring in slavery to the Meachums who sued for their freedom because they felt the Meachums were detaining them in slavery unfairly.
About the database
The list of emancipations registered in the St. Louis Court, compiled by Bob Moore and Dr. Kris Zaplac, includes information on 997 people emancipated between 1817 and 1864. This information contains the date of emancipation, the name of the emancipated person, and the person listed as emancipator. It also sometimes contains alternate names used by the emancipated person, their family relations, their age, their physical descriptions, and descriptions of the emancipator.
Limitations
- This dataset contains emancipations registered in the St. Louis Circuit Court books, as well as a few emancipation records from other archival collections in St. Louis. The recordset does not represent all emancipations in St. Louis.
- This dataset contains emancipations as recorded in the St. Louis Circuit Court record books. It does not describe information from corresponding Deeds of Emancipation.
- This dataset does not always contain all details from the original record.
The SLIDE dataset
The SLIDE dataset was built from the National Parks Service list of emancipations created by Bob Moore and Dr. Kris Zaplac, and thus reproduces the same limitations above. Information such as a person’s sex, family relationships, and other details which may not have been recorded on the National Parks Service emancipations list are not recorded here. At some point, we intend to include a transcription of the original record to ensure all data is represented.
In the “recorded status” column of the datasets, we have written “emancipated” for most individuals, as that is their status at the time of the record’s creation. However, some people recorded in the emancipations database were not emancipated at the time of the record’s creation, but, rather, at some later date–usually once they reached a certain age. For these cases, we have written “enslaved” as their status.
Cite this page
Kelly L. Schmidt and Cecilia Wright, “About the Court Registered Emancipations Database,” The Saint Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement, July 2022, https://sites.wustl.edu/enslavementstl/court-registered-emancipations-database/.