User:Parkwells/Marie Jean Scypion

Marie Jean Scypion (b. c. 1740s - d. June 1802) was an African-Native American woman held as a slave in present-day St. Louis, Missouri to the end of her life, although in 1769 the new Spanish governor had ended Indian slavery. She and her three daughters later tried to gain freedom based on her maternal Indian ancestry, as her mother was a Natchez. Under United States law, which prevailed after 1804, the status of the mother determined that of the children, according to the partus sequitur ventrum principle.

In 1805, after Scypion's death, her daughter Marguerite Scypion filed the first freedom suit in St. Louis. Her victory was overturned by a higher court. In complicated suits against different owners over the years, including the powerful Jean Pierre Chouteau, Marguerite and her two sisters Celeste and Catiche persisted for more than three decades to pursue freedom for themselves and their children. The two surviving daughters won their cases in 1836, gaining freedom for all the Scypion descendants and ending Indian slavery in Missouri. The ruling was upheld in 1838 by the Missouri State and United States Supreme Courts.

Early life
Marie Jean was born into slavery in the 1740s at Fort Chartres, Illinois, then part of La Louisiane when the territory was under French rule. Her mother, called Marie or Mariette, was a Natchez woman taken captive in an Indian war and sold as a slave to French colonists. Her father was an enslaved black man named Scypion. Differing accounts said that he died in an accident or was taken South by his masters. Marie Jean Scypion was first held by a Catholic priest, who gave her to his cousin.

Marie Jean was inherited by the woman's daughter, Marie Louise Boisset, who had married Joseph Tayon (Taillon). Soon after 1764 and the French defeat in the Seven Years War, the Tayons moved their household west across the Mississippi River to the growing settlement of St. Louis to escape English rule on the east side. Tayon built the first water mill there.

Changing rules
In 1763, France ceded its territory west of the Mississippi to Spain following the war; the new Governor General Alejandro O'Reilly worked to improve relations with the Native Americans in the area and to make the slave code consistent with that of other Spanish territories. In 1769 he proclaimed an end to Indian slavery, but this announcement aroused protest by prominent slaveholders in St. Louis, whom he depended on for political support. As Indian slavery had been common in the Mississippi Valley, the merchants and traders held many slaves who were of at least partial Native American descent, frequently with black fathers. The colonists had brought in male ethnic Africans to do the heavy work in the lead mines and agriculture. O'Reilly allowed the slaveholders to retain their Indian slaves while the Spanish Crown reviewed the issue, but prohibited any sales of them.

After the US acquired the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Missouri Territory established slave law in 1804, attempting to integrate the varying codes of French, Spanish and United States law. It classified as mulatto those persons who had one-quarter or more (the equivalent of one grandparent) African ancestry. The status of the many slaves of mixed race with Native American ancestry was ambiguous because of the Spanish ruling on Indian slavery. As the Scypion women pressed for freedom because of their Indian ancestry, their masters consistently tried to have them classified as mulatto or black to evade the legal provisions related to Indian slavery. The following cases demonstrated strong internal family disagreements, as two married daughters opposed their father's wishes for slaves who had been assigned to the women.

Life in St. Louis
Marie Jean Scypion had three surviving daughters born and baptized Catholic in St. Louis: Celeste, Catiche and Marguerite; records do not identify their father. When the first two daughters were young, their mistress Marie Louise Tayon assigned them to her married daughters: Celeste to Helene Chevalier and Catiche to Marie Louise Chauvin.

Scypion was cook and housekeeper of the Tayon household. Tayon had proposed to sell the aging Scypion and all her daughters, but Mmes. Chevalier and Chauvin opposed him. After the death of his wife Marie Louise, Tayon accepted Pierre Chouteau's offer to share his spacious house. He moved there with Scypion, Marguerite and her children, and other slaves. Mme Chauvin later testified in court that Chouteau's brother Auguste was reported to have physically punished Native American slaves of his own household who pressed for freedom and intimidated them from taking further action. Scypion died in 1802, before the United States took over the territory in the Louisiana Purchase.