Diana Cephas
Plaintiff in St. Louis freedom suit (1840)
Diana Cephas was the plaintiff in a freedom suit filed in St. Louis, Missouri in 1840. She won her case after it went to trial in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County in 1843. Born into slavery in Maryland, she and her young son Josiah had been taken to the free state of Illinois in 1839, where she was hired out by her slaveholder over several months. She was then taken to Missouri, a slave state, but won her freedom with the help of freedom suit attorney Francis B. Murdoch, despite the efforts of lawyers Myron Leslie and Roswell M. Field to discredit her.
Background
Both Diana and her son Josiah had been born into slavery in the state of Maryland. Josiah was born in April 1838.
In 1839, Diana and Josiah were taken to the free state of Illinois by slaveholder Mark Delahay and his wife. Delahay settled in Naples, Illinois in July 1839 and hired Diana out to Ross Hughes for months at a time, collecting her wages.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Diana Cephas” as plaintiff in St. Louis freedom suit (1840). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as plaintiff in St. Louis freedom suit (1840). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q111170354. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1840, 1843, 1839 and 1838.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Diana Cephas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.