MISSOURI LEGAL ABOLITIONISTS

LEGAL ABOLITIONISTS: McGIRK BROTHERS OF EARLY MISSOURI Wednesday, July 19, 2017 By Larry Delano Coleman, Esq. I was surprised and pleased to learn that several early Missouri lawyers cum judges were abolitionists, in this slave-holding state, that was a product of Spanish, French, American and Indian forces or influences. Missouri became a State in 1821, as did Maine, both parts of the Missouri Compromise under President James Monroe. Missouri was a slave-state and Maine was a free-state that held for almost forty-years. In addition to that “compromise,” Missouri inherited a mixed body of law: customary, statutory, regnal, that had defined and delimited the rights and privileges of its inhabitants under the Louisiana Purchase, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Within the interstices of this mixed multitude of laws was the “once free always free” notion, which meant that if slaves could demonstrate that they had been previously freed, elsewhere, by whatever means, that once they were brought into the new state of Missouri, as slaves, they could sue for their freedom in Missouri’s courts, and an attorney could be appointed to represent them. Hundreds did so. Hundreds succeeded. Such early success surely inspired the suit of Dred and Harriet Scott for freedom. Those early abolitionist Missouri attorneys included Matthias McGirk and his brother, Isaac McGirk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_McGirk Matthias McGirk was Missouri’s first Chief Justice, having previously been in the Missouri legislature. He authored Rachel v. Walker, 4 Mo. 350 (1836), which freed an enslaved woman who had been taken to free territory by an Army officer. Walker was an important predecessor to the Dred Scott case. Before this, he was an attorney for some other “freedom suit” plaintiffs. Mathias' brother, Isaac McGirk, represented Marguerite Scypion in her claim for freedom in the Missouri courts in 1805. Later Missouri judges and legislatures, in undoing the McGirk’s stellar abolitionist legal work, paved the way for Civil War, which Dred and Harriet Scott’s U. S, Supreme Court loss, rendered inevitable! The book REDEMPTION SONGS by Leah Vandervelde (2014) is an excellent source of confirmation. #30