Hudgins v. Wright

rdf:langString Hudgins v. Wright

rdf:langString Hudgins v. Wright (1806) was a freedom suit decided in the favor of the slave Jackey Wright by the Virginia Supreme Court (then called the Court of Appeals). She had sued for freedom for herself and her two children based on her claim of descent from Indian women. Indian slavery had been prohibited in Virginia since 1705. Since 1662, slave law had incorporated the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, saying that children born in the colony took the social status of their mothers. Her master Houlder Hudgins appealed the decision, saying that Wright was enslaved based on mixed-race ancestry that included African. The case was notable for the Virginia Supreme Court's defining a difference between presumptions about people of Indian and African descent. The noted judge George Wythe, Chancellor of the Circuit Court/Chancery Court, had ruled in Wright's favor in the first trial, based on the presumption of persons being born free as expressed in the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights. St. George Tucker, a noted justice of the Virginia Supreme Court, participated in ruling on the appeals case. He and his fellow justices ruled that the appellant had not provided sufficient evidence to offset Wright's claim to be of Indian descent through her maternal line, as witnesses testified about her mother and grandmother. As a result, based on the long prohibition in the colony against Indian slavery and the Wrights' appearance as "white", Jackey Wright and her two children gained their liberty.