1878

April 17: A long legal fight finally comes to an end when Henrietta Wood wins her lawsuit, seeking compensation from Zebulon Ward, for selling her back into slavery, a quarter century earlier. 

    Her story is well-told in Smithsonian magazine; but here are a few of the details. She was freed by a previous owner in 1848, while living in Cincinnati. Five years later she was kidnapped by Ward and later sold off to a slave owner in Texas. The jury found for Wood, in their verdict, awarding her $2,500 (equal to about $81,500 when recalculated in December 2024.) 

    Wood had finally made it back home in 1869, but had not forgotten her tormentor, and sued Ward for $20,000. 

    That would have been equal to $652,000 in December 2024. 

    As W. Caleb McDaniel writes, 

    “I can’t quite tell my age,” Wood recalled in a newspaper interview in 1876, but she knew she was born enslaved to the Tousey family between 1818 and 1820. In 1834, the teenager was bought by a merchant in Louisville and taken from her family. She was soon sold again, to a French immigrant, William Cirode, who took her to New Orleans.

 

    Cirode returned to France in 1844, abandoning his wife, Jane, who eventually took Wood with her to Ohio, a free state. Then, in 1848, Jane Cirode went to a county courthouse and registered Wood as free. “My mistress gave me my freedom,” Wood later said, “and my papers were recorded.” Wood spent the next several years performing domestic work around Cincinnati. She would one day recall that period of her life as a “sweet taste of liberty.”

 

    Unfortunately, Cirode’s daughter and son-in-law, Josephine and Robert White, still lived in Covington, Kentucky, right across the river from Cincinnati, and they viewed Wood as a valuable “inheritance.” It was then agreed by Mr. and Mrs. White that in return for $300, they would grant Ward the right to sell Henrietta Wood, if he could catch her and keep her. Ward and his gang of “slave catchers” located Wood’s employer, a boardinghouse keeper named Rebecca Boyd and paid her to join their scheme. “One Sunday afternoon in April 1853, Boyd tricked Wood into taking a carriage ride across the river.” 

    Henrietta was first sold to a man named Gerard Brandon, who lived near Natchez, Mississippi, and owned 700 to 800 slaves, and “he put me to work at once in the cotton field,” she remembered. “I sowed the cotton, hoed the cotton, and picked the cotton. I worked under the meanest overseers, and got flogged and flogged, until I thought I should die.” 

    Brandon held her in bondage easily, until July 1, 1863, when Union troops arrived in Natchez, and so, marched 300 of his slaves into Texas, and managed to hold her until well after the war ended, even after “Juneteenth.” In 1866, when she returned to Mississippi with Brandon, she was finally freed – agreeing to work for Brandon for $10 a month, which she said he never paid. It was four more years before she could return to Cincinnati, where she looked for long-lost members of her family. McDaniel was unable to learn whether she succeeded. 

    By this time, Ward was a wealthy man, living in Lexington. Wood hired a lawyer named Harvey Myers and sued. Myers was later murdered by a client’s husband in an unrelated divorce case; but records indicate that in the wake of the jury verdict, Ward did pay damages in 1879.

    As for the conscienceless slave catcher, Mr. Ward, when he died in 1894, he left an estate worth at least $600,000, equal to perhaps as much as $18-20 million in 2024. (I multiplied the known equivalent of $20,000, $652,000, by thirty, getting a figure of $19,560,000; but the difference between the value of the award in 1879, and the value of his estate in 1894, makes an exact calculation problematic.)

 

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 “Could anyone expect less?”

IN THE the Annual Report of the General of the U.S. Army Gen. Phil Sheridan admits, in reference to the Native American tribes of the Great Plains: “We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could anyone expect less? Then, why wonder at Indian difficulties?”

Blogger's collection.
(The white spots are light reflected off the glass over the painting.)

Listening to the hum of a telegraph wire.

Progress for one race meant disaster for another.

Painting from the internet.

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PLAGUED BY VIOLENCE, Dodge City, Kansas has on its books laws requiring all cowboys and others to turn in and place their weapons on racks provided for the purpose, while visiting town. Only peace officers are allowed to carry guns. (article by Peter Lyon, previously referenced).

 

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AN OUTBREAK of yellow fever kills 4,000 in Memphis, Tennessee. (Finley, 129)

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A TRAVELER named Samuel Manning, describes the plague of locusts or grasshoppers he had seen in Kansas: 

    In many places they covered the soil with a moving mass, and filled the air like snowflakes on a snowy day. At a roadside station, the train was not able to start till they had been swept from the track. The growing crops were cut off, the trees stripped of their leaves, and the cattle were starving for want of food. The alarming extension of this insect pest, which has ravaged Kansas, Nebraska, and the neighboring states for the last two or three years, is plausibly explained by the destruction of winged game on the prairies. 100/357