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A FAMILY OF FREE PERSONS SOLD INTO SLAVERY.

My wife Matilda was born in Fayette county, Kentucky, June 17th, 1830.
It seems that her mother and her seven children were to have been free
according to the old Pennsylvania law. There were two uncles of the
family who were also to have been free, but who had been kept over time;
so they sued for their freedom, and gained it. The lawyers in the case
were abolitionists and friends to the slaves, and saw that these men had
justice. After they had secured their freedom, they entered suit for my
wife's mother, their sister, and her seven children. But as soon as the
brothers entered this suit, Robert Logan, who claimed my wife's mother
and her children as his slaves, put them into a trader's yard in
Lexington; and, when he saw that there was a possibility of their being
successful in securing their freedom, he put them in jail, to be "sold
down the river." This was a deliberate attempt to keep them from their
rights, for he knew that they were to have been set free, many years
before; and this fact was known to all the neighborhood. My wife's
mother was born free, her mother, having passed the allotted time under
a law, had been free for many years. Yet they kept her children as
slaves, in plain violation of law as well as justice. The children of
free persons under southern laws were free--this was always admitted.
The course of Logan in putting the family in jail, for safe keeping
until they could be sent to the southern market, was a tacit admission
that he had no legal hold upon them. Woods and Collins, a couple of
"nigger traders," were collecting a "drove" of slaves for Memphis, about
this time, and, when they were ready to start, all the family were sent
off with the gang; and, when they arrived in Memphis, they were put in