He died in 1856, one year after the verdict in his daughter’s case. He had just had time to see the legal action he organized succeed and to begin building the Legal Rights Association that would carry the campaign further. He did not live to see the full arc of what that campaign accomplished.
## The Lemmon Case: The Firm’s Larger Work
The law firm that represented Elizabeth Jennings — Culver, Parker, and Arthur — was not simply a general practice firm that happened to take her case. It was a firm embedded in the antislavery legal work of the era, and the Jennings case was one part of a broader portfolio of civil rights litigation.
The most significant other matter the firm worked on was the Lemmon case, which involved a Virginia slaveholder named Jonathan Lemmon who arrived in New York City in 1852 traveling to Texas with eight enslaved people. Under New York law, enslaved people brought voluntarily into the state could claim freedom. Louis Napoleon, a Black man, filed a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the eight enslaved people. The firm represented them.
The Lemmon case wound its way through the New York courts over several years. Chester Arthur was involved in the litigation, and the case eventually reached the New York Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of the enslaved people’s freedom in 1860. The case was heading toward the U.S. Supreme Court when the Civil War intervened and the question became moot.
The connection between the Lemmon case and the Jennings case is more than coincidental. They were being handled by the same firm, in the same era, with the same basic orientation: using law to vindicate the rights of Black people against the claims of those who sought to deny those rights. The firm had developed expertise, relationships, and a legal framework applicable to both contexts.