Autograph Letter Signed. Nashville, April 27, 1851, to John Bills, Bolivar, Tennessee

quarto, one page, plus stampless address leaf, formerly folded, in very good, clean, and legible condition.

1851 Tennessee lawyer from Connecticut who represented the slave Phebe, winning her freedom in a famed case of "Negro identity"

Attorney Fogg had received Bills' check for "lands sold for Hon. George E. Badger" (U.S. Senator from North Carolina; Secretary of the Navy under William Henry Harrison and John Tyler; nominated for Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court). He wished Bills, a rich plantation owner, a pleasant journey to Europe.

Frances Brinley Fogg, the son of a Connecticut Minister, a "studious New Englander" who became a prominent Nashville lawyer, married to a celebrated woman writer, was an upper-class gentleman who raced horses, was counsel for the University of Nashville and a delegate to the Tennessee Constitutional Convention. Bills was a typical client, a leader of the Tennessee Democratic Party who had married the cousin of President James K. Polk, and, when he wasn't taking one of his frequent trips to Europe, entertained Polk, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, and Jefferson Davis at the mansion on one of his slave plantations.

But, 25 years earlier, one of Fogg's first legal cases was of a different nature. Together with a young James Polk, Fogg had first studied law with Felix Grundy, later Attorney General of the United States in the Van Buren Administration (and a devotee of slavery). It was probably in this way that Fogg became acquainted with the case of "Phebe, a woman of color" whose court suit for her freedom against the violent drunk who had brought her and her sons to Tennessee from Virginia, became a landmark proceeding of slave law and "Negro identity." Phebe had argued that she was being wrongly held in slavery because she was descended from an American Indian woman, her grandmother, who was not a slave. For proof, she had witnesses who testified that they knew her grandmother, who was "of Indian extraction" and a free woman. Since in Tennessee and most Southern states, "racial identity" was determined through the maternal line, Phebe maintained that she too should be considered free. Grundy's law partner, representing the slave-owner, countered that this was merely "illegal" hearsay evidence which should not be credited as proof of Phebe's "pedigree", that "you cannot prove by hearsay whether an ancestor was European or Indian, white or black, Slave or free". Several Courts, with reservations, disagreed and eventually, in 1827 - with Fogg as her counsel - awarded Phebe her freedom. $ 150.00