[1] This ruling was cited as precedent in 1856 in the famous Dred Scott v. Sandford case before the Supreme Court of the United States.
[2] Rachel's was one of 301 19th-century freedom suits found among St. Louis Circuit Court records in the 1990s; it is the largest group of case files in the country available to researchers.
While slaves had no legal standing as citizens, under an 1824 Missouri state law, they were entitled to file as "poor people" to sue for freedom.
The second owner resold them to the slave trader William Walker, who planned to take them "downriver" (down the Mississippi) for likely sale in New Orleans.
"[4] Specifically, the it held that "if an officer of the United States Army takes a slave to a territory where slavery is prohibited, he forfeits his property.
With this ruling, he was supporting the laws of the neighboring free territories and states and closing a loophole by which Army officers had tried to argue they could keep slaves.
[6] Rachel's success in this case gave her the basis to successfully sue for freedom for her son James Henry; as he was born to a woman held illegally as a slave in a free state (and freed on those grounds), he was also free, according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, in which the child gained his social status from his mother.