Marie Jean Scypion was born in the 1740s near Fort de Chartres, the French post on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. Her mother, known as Marie or Mariette, was a Natchez woman taken captive in war and sold into slavery. Her father was an enslaved African man named Scypion, about whom little else is known. Held first by a French priest and then by Joseph Tayon's family, she was brought to St. Louis soon after its founding in 1764. There she had three daughters, Celeste, Catiche and Marguerite.
A Spanish rule
In 1769, after Spain took over Louisiana, the governor forbade Indian slavery, in line with the law in Spain's other colonies. St. Louis slaveholders protested, and they were allowed to keep the people they already held while the Crown reviewed the matter, though such people could not be sold. The rule mattered to Scypion's family because status passed through the mother. If Marie Jean was the free daughter of a Natchez woman, her daughters and their children were free too.
In 1799 Joseph Tayon tried to sell Scypion and all three daughters. His own daughters, who held Celeste and Catiche, refused to give them up, and the family argued the matter before the Spanish magistrate at least three times. The lieutenant governor, Zenon Trudeau, suggested that the women could not lawfully be sold because of their Indian ancestry. Scypion died in June 1802, still enslaved.
Thirty years in court
In 1805, two years after the Louisiana Purchase, Marguerite filed the first freedom suit in the St. Louis circuit court, against François Tayon, who had inherited her. Her sisters won writs of habeas corpus, and for a short time all three were free. A higher court reversed it. The other side argued that a Black grandfather made the women simply of African descent, whatever their grandmother had been, and for twenty years the family stayed enslaved. Marguerite was sold to Pierre Chouteau Sr., one of the most powerful men in the city.
A Missouri law of December 1824 let enslaved people sue as free poor persons, with counsel assigned by the court. Marguerite sued Chouteau in 1825 for assault and false imprisonment, asking $500 in damages. Among her lawyers was Hamilton Rowan Gamble, later chief justice of the state supreme court. She lost at trial and again on appeal, until the Missouri Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1834 and ordered a new trial.
A jury outside the city
Because the Chouteaus carried such weight in St. Louis, her attorneys asked for a change of venue. The case went to St. Charles County and then to Jefferson County, and the sisters' suits were folded into Marguerite's. On November 8, 1836, the jury found unanimously that the descendants of Marie Jean Scypion were free, on the ground she had first raised under Spain. One of the sisters, and some of their children, had died before the verdict. It held on appeal and was taken to have ended Indian slavery in Missouri. Ten years later Dred and Harriet Scott filed their own suits in the same St. Louis court.