Henrietta Wood was born into slavery with the Tousey family on a farm in northern Kentucky sometime between 1818 and 1820.
13 Facts About Henrietta Wood
1.
2.
Moses Tousey died in 1834, and Henrietta Wood was sold to Louisville merchant Henry Forsyth for $700, for whom she did housework.
3.
Henrietta Wood was sold again to another Louisville merchant, William Cirode, who was a French immigrant.
4.
Henrietta Wood was then held in a slave pen in Lexington, Kentucky for a year.
5.
Under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Henrietta Wood was not entitled to a trial or to testify on her own behalf.
6.
However, a sympathetic innkeeper whom Henrietta Wood had encountered in Kentucky filed a lawsuit on her behalf.
7.
The lawsuit took two years, but was unsuccessful because it was not possible to produce papers in Kentucky proving that Henrietta Wood was free; they had been burned in a courthouse fire in Cincinnati in 1849.
Related searches
Lafcadio Hearn 8.
Henrietta Wood worked in cruel conditions in the cotton fields and in the home on Brandon's plantations, and gave birth to her son, Arthur.
9.
Henrietta Wood remained enslaved to him until 1869, when she was finally freed by signing an employment contract with the Brandon family.
10.
Henrietta Wood soon returned to the Cincinnati area with her son.
11.
In 1870, Henrietta Wood began the litigation process to sue Zebulon Ward in federal court in Cincinnati.
12.
Henrietta Wood's case was championed by Lafcadio Hearn of The Cincinnati Commercial.
13.
Henrietta Wood used the restitution to help pay for him to attend Union College of Law, now Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.