In 1828 abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who had escaped slavery with her infant daughter, won a court fight in New York’s Hudson Valley to release her son from slavery. The papers recording her successful fight will be publicly displayed this week.
It was a historic case of a Black woman seeking the release of her son from slavery prevailing in court against a white man. Isabella Van Wagenen, as she was known then, would gain enduring fame as an outspoken abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. As for her deposition and the rest of the court documents, they were boxed up and eventually stored among a million other records, unseen and unrecognized for their significance.
Combing through boxes of documents, he found one from 1828. It had a woman’s name on it, which was unusual for the time. Interest piqued, he read the yellowed paper and saw the woman, Isabella Van Wagenen, was trying to recover her son from slavery. “We always wondered, ‘Where were these records?’” said Paul O’Neill, Ulster County’s commissioner of jurors.
Born into slavery in or around 1797 in the Hudson Valley, she walked away from the home of her final owner in 1826 with her infant daughter after he reneged on a promise to free her. She went to work for the Van Wagenen family, and took their surname.Meanwhile, her son Peter was sold into slavery in Alabama. The sale occurred during the gradual phase out of slavery in New York, where Peter would have been an indentured servant until he was older.
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