As I noted in my recent JER article, “‘A Better Country Than This’: Black Colonization and Missouri Politics, 1850–1865,” the American Colonization Society failed to win widespread support in Missouri for its plan to settle freed slaves in Liberia, but the story of Titus Shropshire shows that a small number of enslaved Missourians believed that the ACS offered a potential path to freedom. In the spring of 1848, Shropshire was thirty-eight years old and living just south of Lancaster, Missouri, in the northeastern part of the state, with his wife Ellin and their seven children. Titus and his family were enslaved to Elizabeth Shropshire, who had inherited them from her father, a Tennessee planter. By his own account, Titus was a “preacher of the gospel” who felt a religious calling to spread the message “of the lord Jesus Christ upon the soil of Africa.” With this goal in mind, he had subscribed to The African Repository and Colonial Journal, the monthly newspaper of the ACS. “Your paper is a Grate light to me,” Shropshire wrote to William McClain, the secretary of the ACS, in 1848. “I loock at the Colonization Society as the greatist thing a mung man kind.” Over the next eleven years, Shropshire continued to correspond with members of the Society, eventually winning a seven-year struggle for his family’s freedom.[i]

Portrait of Henry Clay, president of the ACS, in 1848. From Wikimedia Commons.

The struggle began with Elizabeth Shropshire’s death in May 1849. Although she had left behind a will releasing Titus and his family from bondage, the will was contested by her children, prompting a legal battle that eventually reached the Missouri Supreme Court. A circuit court granted Titus his freedom in 1852, but it ruled that his wife and children had not been legally freed. As Titus wrote to McClain, “I am free my Self but my famley is Left in Slavry and I still hope to go to liberia yet if I can git my famley.” His neighbors in Schuyler County, he explained, “say that if the friends of Colonization a broad will help pay for the famley and let them go to liberia thay will do all thay can to raise [additional money].” To strengthen his appeal, he drew a contrast between the ACS and a local Methodist group that had recently purchased the freedom of two young enslaved women. “Sir,” Shropshire wrote to McClain, “I do think if the Methodist Church a few years ago could raise twenty tow hundred dollars to by tow Girles that the friends of the course can raise a nuft to send a family to Liberia.” As noted in the article, the American Colonization Society was often short of funds in this period, when it depended on the ability of slaveholders to pay for the colonization of their former bondspeople—an option that was not available in Shropshire’s case, which makes it unlikely that his appeal for financial support was successful.[ii]

With respect to his efforts to free his wife and children, however, Titus won a resounding success. On December 23, 1856, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that Elizabeth Shropshire’s will was legally valid, and thus the entire Shropshire family had been freed. “I Take my pen in hand,” Shropshire wrote to McClain, “to say to you that . . . the Court decided them all free by the will [and] we Expect to trie to git of to Liberia in the fall.” However, the fall of 1857 came and went and the Shropshires remained in Missouri. As late as January 1859, Titus was writing to McClain to ask for copies of the African Repository and to say that he was still paying lawyers’ fees. Once again, he believed that he and his family would be “Ready for Liberia . . . in the fall.”[iii]

Rev. Samuel Rose Ely’s certificate of membership (in color) in the American Colonization Society, 1840. From Wikimedia Commons.

Whether the Shropshires ever made it to Liberia, and whether the ACS ever provided the money Titus requested, is unknown. Even if the Shropshires remained in Missouri, however, Titus’s repeated declarations that he and his family would soon depart for Liberia allowed him to win support and legal assistance from his white neighbors. From the death of Elizabeth Shropshire in 1849 to the Missouri Supreme Court decision of 1856, Shropshire chose to work within the limits of the Missouri legal system to free his family from bondage. He did so, moreover, while surrounded by supporters of slavery, including the men who aided him in his legal fight. The administrator of Elizabeth Shropshire’s estate, Richard Caywood, was a proslavery Whig who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Titus Shropshire’s own lawyer, James S. Green, was later elected to succeed David Rice Atchison in the U.S. Senate, where Green championed the proslavery Lecompton Constitution of Kansas. Could Shropshire have counted on the support of Caywood and Green if he had not assured them that he and his family, once freed, would leave Missouri for West Africa?  Perhaps. But given the overwhelming animosity toward free African Americans in the state, there is little doubt that Shropshire’s oft-stated plans for emigration helped to reassure Caywood and Green on this score. Judging by his letters to the ACS, Shropshire was a shrewd man who was well aware of the options that were realistically available to him, and he was determined to control his own destiny.[iv]

Endnotes

[i]. Titus Shropshire to William McLain, Oct. 14, 1849, in The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis,1800–1860, ed. Carter G. Woodson  (Washington, DC, 1926), 57. Shropshire to McLain, May 21 and Aug. 24, 1848, ibid., 56.

[ii]. Shropshire to McLain, Nov. 15, 1853, ibid., 60.

[iii]. Shropshire to McClain, Jan. 11, 1857, ibid., 60. Shropshire to McClain, Jan. 9, 1859, ibid., 61. For the Shropshire case, see Missouri Supreme Court Historical Database, Supreme Court Case Files, 1856, Box 369, Folder 2, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City. For more on Missouri freedom suits in these years, see Kelly M. Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens, GA, 2017).

[iv]. For Caywood, see The Bench and Bar of St. Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson City, and Other Missouri Cities: Biographical Sketches, with Steel Engraved Portraits (St. Louis, 1884), 223. For Green’s support for the Lecompton Constitution, see Senate Bill 161, United States Senate, 35th Congress, 1st Session, Feb. 18, 1858.