Case Name: Bell v. Hogan
Court: United States Circuit Court of the District of Columbia
Jurisdiction: United States
Decision Date: 1811-06
Citations: 2 Cranch 21
Docket Number: 
Parties: Bell v. Hogan.
Judges: (Cranch, C. J., absent,)
Reporter: Reports of cases argued and determined in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia (District of Columbia - reported by Mackey)
Volume: 2
Pages: 21–22

Head Matter:
Bell v. Hogan.
If a colored man was bom a slave, his being permitted to go at large without restraint, and to act as a free man, is no evidence of his being free.
If the plaintiffs’s freedom was not so notorious that the defendant might be presumed to know it, the defendant is not liable to damages for taking up the plaintiff as a runaway; he being a colored man and, primó, facie, a slave.
Trespass. Assault, battery, and false imprisonment.
The case was, that the defendant took up the plaintiff as a runaway, and carried him before a justice of the peace.

Opinion:
The Court
(Cranch, C. J., absent,)
on the prayer of the defendant, instructed the jury, that if they believed, from the evidence that the plaintiff was born a slave, his being permitted to go at large without restraint, and to act as a free man, was no evidence of his being free. And that if the plaintiff had recently come into this county, and was not known to the defendant to be free, and his freedom was not so notorious that the defendant might be presumed to know it, then the defendant is not liable in this action, if he used no unnecessary violence, and took up the plaintiff with a bona fide intention of ascertaining whether he was a slave or not.
Fitzhugh, J.,
in a note to this ease, says " The ground of those instructions was, that the plaintiff's color was prima facie evidence of his being a slave, and justified his being taken up under a suspicion of his being a runaway. In any question respecting a negro's freedom, it is incumbent upon the negro to show that he is free; and this must be by producing the record of his emancipation. If he had been proved to have been born a slave, he is presumed to be always a slave, and the burden of proving his emancipation devolves on him."