The son of enslaved parents in Goochland County, Va, John Berry Meachum was born in 1789, a few days after the inauguration of George Washington. When Meachum’s enslaver, Paul Meachum, moved him from Virginia to North Carolina to Kentucky, John used his carpentry, blacksmithing and coopering skills to save money. By the time he was 21, he had convinced his master to sell him to another slavemaster:
John Berry Meachum.
Although many people claim Meachum bought his own freedom, manumission was illegal in North Carolina. So Meachum couldn’t buy his freedom. Technically, he purchased himself.
He was free. He could have disappeared into Indiana or Ohio. He could have started over. Instead, he walked 700 miles back to Virginia and bought his father out of bondage for 100 Virginia pounds. Then he taught his dad how to be a carpenter. Working together, the two of them went back to Kentucky and freed the rest of their family. And when his 100-year-old former enslaver offered to manumit all 75 of his remaining enslaved people if Meachum would lead them out of the state, Meachum walked them from Kentucky into Indiana. Seventy-five people. On foot. To freedom.
After becoming a Baptist minister, Meachum founded the First African Baptist Church—the first Black church west of the Mississippi. But he still wasn’t finished. His wife, Mary, was still enslaved. Her owner had taken her and the Meachums’ children to St. Louis. So John followed. He arrived in 1815 with three dollars to his name, and over the next several years, he used his carpentry earnings to purchase the freedom of Mary, their children, and roughly 20 other enslaved people.
The Meachums didn’t just free them and send them on their way. They employed them, trained them in trades and let them earn back their purchase price before granting them formal emancipation.
By 1835, John Berry Meachum was worth $25,000. He was a pastor. He was a business owner. And he was running a school in the basement of that church, teaching free and enslaved Black people to read, write and do arithmetic. At its peak, the school served up to 3,000 students for a $1 “subscription.” Those who could pay did. Those who couldn’t didn’t. Meachum didn’t turn anyone away.
White St. Louis tolerated this for a while. But Black literacy has always been treated as a threat in this country, because people who can read can organize, and people who can organize cannot be so easily controlled. First, the city passed a local ordinance banning the education of free Black people. Enforcement was inconsistent, but the message was clear. Then, in 1847, Missouri’s state legislature passed a law making it a crime to instruct any Black or mixed-race person in reading or writing. The sheriff showed up at Meachum’s church. He and one of his teachers were arrested and threatened.
That was supposed to be the end of it.
It wasn’t.
Meachum understood something about jurisdictions that Missouri’s legislators apparently hadn’t considered. The Mississippi River was a federal waterway. Missouri law stopped at the riverbank. So Meachum bought a steamboat, outfitted it with desks, chairs and a library, anchored it in the middle of the Mississippi and called it the Floating Freedom School. Students were ferried out to the boat, where they learned to read and write in plain sight of a state that had criminalized their education. Those who could afford it paid one dollar a month. The rest came for free.
It was perfectly legal. And there was nothing Missouri could do about it.
Hundreds of Black children—enslaved and free—passed through the Floating Freedom School in the 1840s and 1850s. Two of them deserve particular attention.
James Milton Turner was one of the school’s earliest students. He was present when Meachum was arrested. After the Civil War, Turner co-founded Lincoln Institute, the first institution of higher education for Black people in Missouri. Under President Ulysses S. Grant, he became the first African American to serve as a U.S. minister to a foreign nation, representing the country in Liberia. He spent his later years advocating for the rights of the Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw people in Indian Territory. One school on a steamboat produced a man who built 30 more schools and became a diplomat.
The other was John R. Anderson.
Anderson was born in 1818 in Shawneetown, Ill., to parents who had been enslaved in Virginia. As a child, he was brought to Missouri under an indenture arrangement that was, for all intents and purposes, just a way to get around the fact that the time he spent in Illinois territory should have made him legally free. Still, he gained his freedom at age 12 and enrolled in the floating schoolhouse where he studied theology, philosophy and literature. Anderson founded Central Baptist Church in 1846, making it the second-oldest African American church in St. Louis. Before that, he had worked as a typesetter for the abolitionist editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy in Alton, Ill. He was in the room when a pro-slavery mob murdered Lovejoy and destroyed his printing press in 1837. Anderson saw, firsthand, what happened when a white man tried to publish the truth about slavery. He kept working anyway.
When Meachum collapsed at his pulpit and died on a Sunday morning in February 1854, Anderson took over management of the Floating Freedom School and kept it running. But he didn’t stop there. Alongside a white Baptist minister named Galusha Anderson, he spent a decade lobbying the St. Louis Board of Education to fund public schools for Black children. He served on a 10-member board of education—three Black ministers, two Black businessmen, and three white members—that was the first of its kind in the city. By 1864, St. Louis had finally opened four public schools for African Americans.
After John’s death, Mary Meachum continued the work that had defined their partnership—specifically, her role as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. She sheltered runaways in her home and organized their passage across the Mississippi into Illinois. On the night of May 21, 1855, she led a group of freedom seekers toward the river. Slave catchers discovered them and arrested Mary five days later under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
She beat the case.
The deposition from her case was mysteriously torn from the court record book, so we may never know the full details of her acquittal. But the Floating School began teaching enslaved people how to file their own freedom suits. In fact, when Harriet Scott enrolled her daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, in the Floating School, she told Anderson that they had previously lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where the girls were born.
“Wait…If you lived in Wisconsin, you’re not a slave,” Anderson explained. “And if the girls were born in Illinois, then they were NEVER enslaved. You should file a lawsuit because technically, your entire family should be free.”
When Harriet went home with Eliza and Lizzie, she told her husband what Anderson said. They became the first married couple to file a freedom suit.
And they won!
Lizzie and Eliza Scott were free! Harriet Scott was free. But the slavemaster appealed the father’s freedom suit victory until the case reached the Supreme Court
Today’s Reading List:
John Berry Meachum and the Floating Freedom School
The Inside Story of the Lafayette Park Drug Bust That George HW Bush Used to Sell the War On Drugs by Matt Blitz
Name of Thurmond’s biracial daughter added to monument by Julie Halenar
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