Polly Berry

Polly Berry, also known as Polly Crockett and Polly Wash (b. c. 1818 – d. c. 1870–1880), was an African-American woman notable for winning two freedom suits in St. Louis, Missouri, one for herself, which she won in 1843, and one for her daughter Lucy, which she won in 1844. She sued for her own freedom based on having been held illegally as a child slave in the free state of Illinois. In 1842 Berry sued for the freedom of her daughter Lucy Ann Berry, as the girl had legally been born to a free woman. That case was argued by Edward Bates, the future U.S. Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln.
Polly Berry's life is primarily known through her daughter's memoir, "From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom" (1891), the only first-person account of a freedom suit. She published her memoir under her married name of Lucy Delaney.
In the 1990s, the case files of these two suits were among more than 300 freedom suits discovered among nineteenth-century Circuit Court records in St. Louis. The Missouri State Archives and Washington University have created a searchable online database of the freedom suit files containing scanned images of the complete case files (which tend to be brief documents) held by the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis and the Missouri Historical Society.
Biography.
In her case which she filed in 1839, Polly deposed that she was held as a child in slavery in Wayne County, Kentucky by Joseph Crockett. When she was about fourteen, he migrated west and took her with him to Illinois, where they stayed for several weeks. Illinois as a free state held that slaveholders who brought slaves into the state for extended periods forfeited their rights to their "property," and the slaves became legally free. During that time, Crockett hired out Polly for domestic servant tasks, and she was known as Polly Crockett. Next he took her up the Missouri River for about five years within the slave state of Missouri.
Polly was sold to a Major Taylor Berry in St. Louis, Missouri. She married one of his slaves, said to be a mulatto, and they had two daughters, Nancy and Lucy Ann Berry. (Much of this information came initially from Lucy Ann's memoir "From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom" (1891). She had mistakenly said that her mother was born free in Illinois, kidnapped and sold into slavery.)
Following the Major's death, his widow Fanny Berry married Robert Wash, one of three Missouri State Supreme Court justices. Fanny Wash died a few years later. Despite Major Berry providing in his will to free his slaves after his and his wife's deaths, Fanny's widower Robert Wash sold Polly's husband to a plantation in the Deep South. The Berry daughters reclaimed Polly Berry (also called Polly Wash at the time, in reference to her master's name) and her daughters from Wash.
Fearing another sale, Polly Berry prepared her daughters for escape. While Nancy Berry was accompanying Mary Berry Coxe and her new husband on their honeymoon to Niagara Falls, New York, she fled successfully across the river by ferry to Canada, which had abolished slavery. There she first stayed with a friend of her mother's; she settled in Toronto, where she married and had her own family in freedom.
After conflict in the household of Mary Berry Coxe, Polly Berry was sold to Joseph M. Magehan, a lumberman. She escaped in 1839, reaching Chicago before being captured by slave catchers under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. They returned her to St. Louis and her master Magehan. She resolved to protect her daughter Lucy Ann, who was 12 years old.
Berry/Wash filed a freedom suit in the St. Louis Circuit Court on October 3, 1839, on the basis that, as a child, she had been illegally held as a slave in the free state of Illinois ("Polly Wash v. Joseph M. Magehan"). Her attorney was Harris Sprout. It was not until 1843 that her case was tried, but she successfully proved her case in court. While the case was pending, Wash was hired out as a laundress to earn money against her upkeep. Her daughter suggested in her memoir that Wash's attorneys proposed the strategy of filing separate suits for her and her daughter, to prevent a jury's worrying about taking too much property from one slaveholder.
Martha Berry Mitchell, another of the married daughters of the late Major Berry, claimed the slave girl Lucy Ann Berry as a domestic servant. Angered over the girl's lack of skills with laundry, Mitchell confronted her physically, which Lucy Ann resisted. Martha and her husband David D. Mitchell decided to sell the young slave downriver. (Mitchell was serving in St. Louis as the US regional Superintendent for Indian Affairs.) Before being shipped away, Lucy Ann escaped to a friend of her mother.
Polly Berry (then known as Polly Wash) immediately filed suit on September 8, 1842 as a "next friend" of her daughter against David D. Mitchell. Her own case had not yet been tried, and as a slave she had no individual legal standing, but the law allowed her to file a suit on behalf of her minor daughter. According to the rule of "partus sequitur ventrem", which had been adopted into US slave law, the status of children followed that of the mother. Since Lucy Ann was born to a woman considered free at the time in Illinois, she should also have been free. Lucy Ann was remanded to jail, where she was held for 17 months. Unusually, she was not hired out. Wash's attorneys wanted to ensure that Lucy Ann Berry was kept in St. Louis until the trial, but it also appeared that Mitchell enforced her imprisonment. Usually enslaved prisoners were hired out, with the wages given to the owner.
On June 6, 1843, Polly Wash was declared a free woman by an all-white jury, on the basis of witnesses who testified she had been held as a slave in Illinois, where the law ruled slaveholders' forfeited their rights to slaves if they stayed voluntarily in the state. This precedent of "once free, always free" had been set in the 1824 Missouri case of "Winny v. Whitesides". Wash's suit for her daughter had yet to be heard.
Lucy Ann's case was not heard until February 7 and 8, 1844. Her attorneys argued that Lucy Berry's freedom was based on her birth to a woman who had been proven to be free based on having been held illegally years before in Illinois. Francis Butter Murdoch, the former district attorney for Alton, Illinois, prepared the case. He was highly involved in freedom suits in St. Louis. (He had prosecuted the murder of Elijah Lovejoy in Alton by anti-abolitionists.)
Wash also gained the aid of the prominent Whig politician Edward Bates. Although a slaveholder, he argued the case in court. He was later appointed as the US Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln. With Wash's case settled by the principle of "once free, always free," Bates was able to convince the jury that her daughter Lucy Ann Berry should be considered free as well.
As the scholar Eric Gardner writes,
To Bates--as to the majority of the Missouri Supreme Court for several years--such a principle actually depended on recognizing and allowing legal slavery: if an individual African American was not "once free"--through birth to a free mother, residence, manumission, or other circumstances carefully specified in state law--then she or he had no legal right to demand freedom. This syllogism, of course, explains why Bates could be a slaveholder and still support Lucy [Berry] Delaney; this premise is why, he argues by extension, the jury could do the same.
The record of the decision said, "it is therefore considered by the Court that said Plaintiff be liberated and entirely set free from the Defendant and from all persons claiming by, through, or under him by title derived since the commencement of this suit." Lucy Ann was 14 years old.
Wash filed a second suit on behalf of her daughter, for $1000 in damages against David D. Mitchell for false imprisonment. The information in the two case files does not entirely agree with the account in Lucy Delaney's autobiography. By this suit, Wash and Murdoch may have been trying to preclude Mitchell from appealing the court's decision, in addition to seeking reparations. They later dropped the suit without trial.
Lives in freedom.
Polly Berry lived with her daughter Lucy Ann for the rest of her life. At first they worked together as seamstresses. Polly Berry visited her daughter Nancy and grandchildren in Toronto in 1845, and the younger woman offered to settle her there. Berry chose to return to Lucy Ann and her familiar St. Louis roots. She died without seeing her husband again.
More than 45 years later, after a life of civic activism, in 1891 Lucy Ann Berry Delaney (then married) published her memoir "From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom". The only first-person account of a freedom suit, it is also considered a slave narrative, recounting the journey to freedom. She told of her mother's struggles to use the courts to gain their freedom. Delaney dedicated the book to the Grand Army of the Republic, which had secured the freedom of slaves throughout the South by its victory in the American Civil War. She described her adult life and activism in a variety of religious and civic organizations.
It was not until the 1990s that the Wash and Berry case files were discovered among hundreds of freedom suits . Although some—such as the Dred and Harriet Scott files—had been set aside, most freedom suits were filed by case number together with all the other circuit court case files; surviving indices generally listed them under the broad rubric of "trespass." Some early suits had been filed against the leading families of St. Louis, such as Chouteau, Cabanné, Sarpy, and Papin, who were slaveholders before and after the Louisiana Purchase. Under the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, the case files are available to scholars for research, and a searchable database with digitized images of each case file is online.