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Provincial Case File No. 22344, New Hampshire State Archives - Peter Johnson's Mittimus

Documents from Making Habeas Work: A Legal History (monograph)

In New Hampshire, as elsewhere, suits by alleged slaves claiming freedom were common, and they could be brought in many legal forms. One possibility was to petition for a writ of habeas corpus and thereby commence ordinary proceedings under that writ. That is what Peter Johnson of Portsmouth, New Hampshire did in the summer of 1748 in claiming that he had been wrongfully “imprisoned for refusing to serve as a slave