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Philip Spiess
A surprising addendum to the previous entry:
It turns out that, with all of the current talk about the payment of reparations for slavery due to African-Americans, there was one slave in history who actually was paid reparations for her slavery -- and that was in Cincinnati! According to an article in the Smithsonian Magazine, and reprinted in the current issue of The Week magazine, in 1878 Henrietta Wood, a "spectacled negro woman, apparently 60 years old," won $2,500 in reparations (although she had sued for $20,000) from Zebulon Ward, a white man who had enslaved Wood twenty-five years before.
The story is incredible -- but all too typical -- of what was happening to black Americans in the period of American history between, say, 1820 and the Civil War. Henrietta Wood had been born into bondage in northern Kentucky, and had been sold out of her family as a teenager, serving as a slave first in Louisville and later in New Orleans to a Frenchman. The Frenchman abandoned his wife and returned to France in 1844, and the wife took Wood with her to Ohio (a free state) and, in 1848 in Cincinnati, Wood was granted her freedom, her mistress going to the county courthouse and registering Wood as free; the papers were officially recorded. She spent the next several years doing domestic work around Cincinnati.
Nevertheless, the Frenchman's daughter and son-in-law viewed Wood as their inheritance (after all, slaves were considered "property"). They lived in Covington, just across the river from Cincinnati in Kentucky (a slave state), and in 1853 they persuaded Zebulon Ward, a deputy sheriff in Covington, to pay them $300 for the right to sell Wood as a slave and take the profit for himself, providing he could abscond with her. Accordingly, Wood was kidnapped by Zebulon Ward, having been betrayed by her boardinghouse mistress, and she was sold back into slavery, where she remained for the next sixteen years! (The record of her being freed perished in a courthouse fire in 1849; her kidnappers, had, of course, taken her copy of the papers from her.)
I won't go through the vicissitudes of those sixteen years, but Wood was shortly sold at the Natchez slave market and ended up as a slave at Brandon Hall on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi; Gerard Brandon was one of the largest slaveholders in the South, and Wood was flogged aplenty. At some point, she gave birth to her son Arthur. But when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Brandon, detemined to defy the decree, marched some 300 slaves 400 miles into Texas, just days before the U. S. Army entered Natchez to free the slaves. Thus Brandon kept Wood enslaved on a Texas plantation until several years after the Civil War had ended; she finally returned to Cincinnati in 1869.
Wood found a Cincinnati lawyer who helped her file a lawsuit against Ward, who had kidnapped and sold her, although she was legally free. Ward was now a wealthy man (he left an estate worth at least $600,000), living in Lexington, Kentucky; his team of lawyers stalled the case in court for a number of years. Then another setback -- Wood's lawyer was murdered by a client's husband in an unrelated divorce case. Finally, on April 17, 1878, twelve white jurors in a federal courtroom in Cincinnati, in the case of Wood v. Ward under Judge Phillip Swing, awarded Henrietta Wood, former slave, $2,500 as compensation for more than sixteen years of unpaid labor. Meager as this was (compared to her claim), it enabled her son, Arthur, to buy a house in Chicago, start a family, and pay for his own schooling; he was one of the first African-American graduates of Northwestern University's School of Law. This was the only reparation for slavery ever paid to an African-American for enslaved servitude to date!
[The book, by W. Caleb McDaniel, from which he drew the article on which I based this entry, is Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America (2019).]
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