St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project

The St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project and Revised Dred Scott Collection would have been impossible without the past projects and efforts formed around the historical cases in the St. Louis Circuit Court archive on which they are built. The first step was recognition of the importance of the material in the files of the St. Louis Circuit Court at the old court building.

In the early 1990s, Robert Moore, a National Park Service Historian at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, was alerted to the existence of a number of civil suits as part of the records of the St. Louis Circuit Court, in addition to the famous Dred Scott case, in which enslaved people sued for their freedom. As Moore describes, when he first looked at the freedom suits, he had to shake off coal dust to read them. 

This led to the curation of the entire St. Louis Circuit Court records collection by the Missouri State Archives and two distinct digital projects created at Washington University. The St. Louis Circuit Court Records project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and a partnership among Washington University, the Missouri State Archives, and the Missouri History Museum, builds on these previous digital projects, expanding the collection to nearly 500 transcribed cases with rich metadata. It is our hope that the digitization and dissemination of these cases give a name and a voice to those who may have otherwise been lost to history.

Phase 1

As the importance of the material—and not just the freedom suits—began to be recognized, plans were developed for the re-housing of the documents. The entire record was deposited with the Missouri State Archives-St. Louis, in the Globe Building in downtown St. Louis, where archivists began the long tasks of the cleaning, arrangement, description and preservation of the material. Along the way, grants from The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Save America's Treasures programs helped continue this work.

Read more about the archivists’ work of processing these records and making them accessible on the Internet Archive.

Read more about the preservation of these records on the Internet Archive.

Close on the heels of plans for the curation of the records came discussions regarding possibilities for providing greater access to the documents through digitization. The Missouri State Archives partnered with Washington University Libraries on the first project, and with American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis on a subsequent project. The first project focused exclusively on the Dred Scott case, which imaged and transcribed 85 documents associated with the case. The second project, the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project dealt with a broader set of cases, comprised of four collections: freedom suits; suits relating to the early fur trade in Missouri; suits involving Native Americans, and suits related to Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. In this project, case files were imaged (but not transcribed) and a database of metadata was developed to organize the materials. 

Read more about the digitization process on the Internet Archive.

In 2006, Washington University Libraries created a new unit for a greater focus on digital projects, Digital Library Services (DLS). Maintenance of the Dred Scott digital collection fell to DLS and in 2007, DLS undertook to further improve access to the case documents by migrating the HTML transcriptions to TEI (the Text Encoding Initiative, a widely-used standard for the encoding books as electronic texts) XML for robust markup and improved search, resulting in the Revised Dred Scott collection. During her graduate studies, now Dr. Crystal Alberts was hired to assist with the migration given her previous experience with legal standards and practice.  Alberts quickly noticed that the "titles" of the documents given in the Dred Scott case files were often descriptive, rather than following conventions of legal practice, i.e., referred to as "petitions," "summons," "pleas," etc. DLS staff members researched vocabularies and schemas to use in encoding this information but could not find an appropriate standard. The absence of a suitable schema for markup of historical legal texts seemed a need that deserved to be filled, and this need was the basis of the grant application made to the Institute for Museum and Library Services in 2009.

Read further history of this project phase on the Internet Archive.

Phase 2

The 2009 proposal submitted to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) by the Washington University Libraries, in partnership with the Missouri History Museum, had two primary emphases: 1) the creation of a set of extensions to the TEI for markup of historic legal documents, and 2) the transcription of all the cases that were included in the original St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, encoded in TEI and with the extensions to the TEI for legal documents developed by the project. But the project had goals beyond the schema and the encoding of the cases, in terms of content but also access and interaction. Additional project content included:

• Imaging, transcription and encoding of  St. Louis City Directories
• Transcription and encoding of over 1,000 Freedom Bonds
• Imaging of 2 Index Volumes, 2 Inverted Index Volumes, and 30 Record Books 

This content is indicative of some of the other project goals beyond the straightforward increased access to the cases, and accurate representation as legal documents through the implementation of the schema. While all the legal documents in the collections are compelling from a variety of perspectives, it is the freedom suits that have received the most attention, and for good reason. Even nearly twenty years after the discovery of freedom suits besides Dred and Harriet Scott’s, the fact that enslaved African Americans could and did sue in court for their freedom before the Emancipation Proclamation is not widely known. This is understandable from one perspective, because the context of what is widely known today about the status of enslaved people then makes the idea of an enslaved person suing for freedom—beyond the implausibility of this even being a legal possibility—almost inconceivable, when considering the ramifications for a person undertaking such a suit. And as many historians writing about the suits have remarked, the possible (and actual) consequences of the decision to sue for one's freedom were grave. There is no other way to describe the decision than as heroic. And heroic acts deserve remembrance. The fact is, however, many of those who undertook these suits are known only by one name, and in many cases, the individual is known only by the court record recorded here. 

The reason for including the supplementary materials of the city directories and freedom bonds in the project was in hopes that some of the names in the court cases might be matched in those materials. The city directories are one of the most popular resources at the Missouri History Museum Library and research center, especially for genealogical research.

View the history of Outreach during this phase of the project. 

Phase 3

In 2022, Washington University Libraries moved the project to a temporary home after the retirement of the original project infrastructure while the present website was constructed. In 2026, it relaunched the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project and Dred Scott Collection on this site, built on Omeka S, to facilitate access to the interrelated records within these important projects.

The original project sites may be accessed through the Internet Archive through the links below. Please be advised that the original sites’ search function is not included in the archived version.

• Revised Dred Scott Case Collection
• St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project

Metadata Schema

In migrating the sites to Omeka S, we extracted existing elements and attributes from the XML files and added them as metadata fields to the relevant item.  All names in metadata were normalized, while the transcriptions retain the original spelling. The legacy XML files are available upon request; however, the transcriptions in the XML files have not been updated to match the transcriptions on this site. Consult the custom RDF ontology for the metadata schema description. You can also consult the Glossary of Legal Terms to understand the meaning of legal terminology that might be used in these metadata fields or in the transcriptions.

This phase also added a side-by-side image and transcription viewer, along with transcription editor to allow researchers to submit suggested changes to transcriptions.

Contributors

This project was uniquely an effort of several groups of contributors who devoted significant time and areas of expertise to make the project a success.

St. Louis Circuit Court

Mariano V. Favazza, J.D., City of St. Louis Circuit Clerk, 1999 - 2010; Mavis T. Thompson, J.D., City of St. Louis Circuit Clerk, 1993 - 1998.

Missouri State Archives Historical Records Division

John Dougan, M.A., State Archivist; Michael Everman, C.A., Archivist, Local Records Program-St. Louis; William Glankler, Supervising Archivist Missouri State Archives Historical Records Division - St. Louis Branch.

Missouri History Museum

Emily Jaycox, M.L.S.; Jason Stratman; Christopher Gordon, Director, Library & Collections at Missouri Historical Society

Washington University Libraries

Staff

Erika Cohn, J.D., M.L.S., Makiba Foster, M.L.I.S., Guy Gray, Andrea Johnson, Tim Lepczyk, M.S.I.S., Andrew Rouner, Ph.D. (Project Director), Shannon Showers, M.L.S., Cassandra Stokes, M.L.I.S., Sarah Swanz, J.D., M.S., Kelly L. Schmidt, Ph.D., Cadence Cordell, M.S. Elizabeth Schwartz, M.S., Miranda Rectenwald, M.A., C.A., Danielle Creech, M.L.S.

Students

Kaitlin Thompson, Elizabeth Mohan, Jennifer Brazier, Promita Majumdar, Judith Ohikuare, Marcia McIntosh, Candace Girod, Natalia Jamula...and many others!

Humanities Digital Workshop (Washington University School of Arts & Sciences)

Doug Knox, M.A., Steve Pentecost, M.A., Perry Trolard, M.L.I.S.

Washington University Law Library

Dora Bertram, J.D., M.S.; Hyla Bondareff, J.D., M.S.L.I.S., Aris Woodham, J.D., M.L.I.S.

Project Advisors

Kenneth Winn, Ph.D., Director of Library and Public Services, Supreme Court of Missouri; John Barden, Ph.D., J.D., Director, State Law and Legislative Reference Library, Maine State Legislature; Nicholas Finke, J.D.,InterActive Legal, LLC; David Konig, Ph.D., Professor of History and Professor of Law, Washington University

Friends of the Project

Lynn Morrow, Director Local Records (Missouri State Archives); Robert Moore, M.A., Historian, National Park Service, The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial; Lea VanderVelde, J.D., Josephine Witte Professor of Law, University of Iowa Law College; Philip Berwick, J.D., Associate Dean for Information Resources & Senior Lecturer in Law, Washington University School of Law; Joseph Lowenstein, Ph.D., Professor of English in Arts & Sciences, Director, Humanities Digital Workshop, Washington University; Shirley K. Baker, Vice Chancellor for Scholarly Resources & Dean (retired); Gail Oltmanns, Associate University Librarian, Jeff Huestis, Associate University Librarian (Washington University Libraries)

See other past collaborators and support for the project on the Internet Archive 

Special Acknowledgement

The present project is built on the foundation of the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, and used images and metadata created from that project, provided by the Missouri State Archives. A special thank-you is owed to Michael Everman, who oversaw the physical documents in the Globe Building, never refused any request for assistance, and has been indispensable to so many researchers of this archive.

Copyright and Reproduction

The digital collections on this website are in the public domain and free to use for noncommercial, educational, and research purposes.

References to the records on this website should be cited as follows:
 
Plaintiff v. Defendant 
Term of Court, Year 
Case File Number 
(Cite specific document if required) 
Circuit Court Case Files 
Office of the Circuit Clerk-St. Louis 
Missouri State Archives-St. Louis 
Office of the Secretary of State 
[Date Accessed, https://digitalexhibits.library.washu.edu/s/ccr/item/[item #]]