Welcome to Petitioning for Freedom
We invite you to explore the thousands of petitions lodged to challenge coercion and confinement in the American West between 1812 and 1924. Offering a compelling portrait of marginalized peoples’ legal mobilization and campaigns for racial and social justice, Petitioning for Freedom invites you to learn more about the creative and critical uses of habeas corpus in local, state, and federal courts. Collectively, these petitions tell the story of coercion and resistance in American history; individually, they tell the story of local jurists and remarkable petitioners who leveraged the law in unexpected ways.
The Browsing Guides encourage you to navigate the database thematically and are suited to visitors curious about who wielded habeas in the long nineteenth century, where habeas trends emerged and shifted, when habeas coincided with or diverged from national and local events, and what types of petitions featured prominently over time.
Visitors with more specific questions are welcome to search Cases and People for known case or party names and will find a useful array of case attributes and demographic features to broaden their searches.
Featured Stories
Learn more about the sophisticated legal arguments and poignant freedom stories contained in individual petitions that highlight the significance of habeas more broadly as a central chapter in American legal history.
Lucía Martínez: Yaqui Arizona, 1854-1900
Lucía Martínez was born around 1854 in the Rio Yaqui valley of Sonora, Mexico. The borderlands traffic in Mexican and Indigenous slaves made Indigenous women and children particularly vulnerable, and by 1864, Apache slavers had abducted Lucía into the Black River region of central Arizona. Remarkably, the 10 year-old girl escaped, but she was then found by King S. Woolsey, a renowned Indian killer, who was leading an anti-Apache and gold-scouting expedition in the vicinity [...]
Read Lucía’s Story
The Habeas Corpus and Divorce Proceedings of Katie Mayes
On January 26, 1887, Katherine (Katie) Marie Dora Yaeger married Franklin Pierce Mayes in Lincoln, Nebraska. After getting married, they settled on a farm near Emerald, Nebraska with Franklin’s two sons that he had with his first wife, Julia Ann Vaughan. Julia passed away two years prior. Between the years of 1888 and 1901, Katie and Franklin had four sons: John, George, Leroy, and Leslie. They eventually moved to Lincoln and then separated. Despite outlining different reasons for their separation, the couple agreed that they had been separated for several years prior to Katie’s petition [...]
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Fannie Fowle & Habeas in the Pacific Maritime World
Featured prominently in our collection of Settle petitions, Judge Roger Greene heard a devastating account of abduction, abuse, and confinement from Fannie Fowle on November 21, 1885. Fowle swore that British Captain George Finlayson had taken her hostage from her home in New South Wales, Australia, that she tried to escape his ship in Hong Kong and repeatedly thereafter even though he beat her and called her his slave. Fowle’s horrifying condition only became known after Finlayson’s crew sued him in Seattle’s admiralty court for breach of contract and abusive treatment [...]
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Gussie Burns & the Story of Omaha Women’s Detention Home & Habeas in the Progressive Era
On May 1, 1919, the police arrested Gussie Burns for vagrancy after raiding Flossie Kane's home at 1213 Cass Street, Omaha, Nebraska. The police found two bottles of cocaine in Kane's house and arrested Kane as the keeper of a disorderly house. There were three other women and three men present in the house with Kane during the raid; one of the women was Gussie Burns. The police charged Burns with vagrancy, and the judge convicted and sentenced her to thirty days in jail. After her arrest, a health official, who was most likely male, forced her to submit to a physical examination for venereal disease [...]
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