Rachel v. Walker

Rachel v. Walker (1834) was a "freedom suit" filed in the St. Louis Circuit Court by an African woman named Rachel who had been enslaved. She petitioned for her freedom and that of her son James (John) Henry from William Walker (a slave trader), based on having been held illegally as a slave in the free territory of Michigan by a previous master, an Army officer. Her case was appealed to the Supreme Court of Missouri, where she won in 1836. The court ruled that an Army officer forfeited his slave if he took the person to territory where slavery is prohibited.^[1] This ruling was cited as precedent in 1856 in the famous Dred Scott v. Sandford case before the Supreme Court of the United States.^[2]

Rachel's was one of 301 19th-century freedom suits found among St. Louis Circuit Court records in the 1990s; it is the largest group of case files in the country available to researchers. The Missouri History Museum's research center maintains a searchable database online of the freedom suits.