ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on enslaved families and how family is represented by the plaintiff, how he or she represented him- or herself, and what story the (formerly) enslaved individual chose to tell. Because these trials were initiated by mothers and fathers, the focus lies especially on whether their parenthood played a particular role in their argumentation/story. It will turn out that this was not as much the case as one might have assumed. Mostly, these mothers and fathers based their arguments on legal reasoning. Here, several generations of servitude become apparent both from the defendants' and plaintiffs’ statements. Often, the plaintiff stemmed from a family that had been owned by the defendant for generations. One court case in this chapter differs substantially from the others, as it is a criminal one and not a freedom suit (Section 2.2.1). Here, a formerly enslaved father was accused of having killed two of his three children. Contrary to the assumption that he killed his children to free them from enslavement, he claimed to have done it because he went mad in that moment. His own social status or that of his children played no role in their murder, contradicting existing assumptions.
