194 Years After Ex-Slave Sojourner Truth’s Historic Win, Original Court Documents On Public Display For First Time
The original court documents from the 1828 case that abolitionist Sojourner Truth won as Isabella Van Wagenen will be on public display at the Ulster County Courthouse in Kingston, New York.
In 1828, Isabella Van Wagenen, a Black woman in the United States who had escaped slavery with her infant daughter, won a historic court battle to bring her enslaved minor son, Peter, home from Alabama. This was believed to be the first time in American history that a Black woman had sued a White man and won.The case won her immense fame as an abolitionist, and she is the same women’s rights advocate who went on to be known by the name she took later — Sojourner Truth.
Unfortunately, however, her deposition and the significant court documents related to the historic case remained unseen, boxed up with a million other court records.
Not any more.
The documents will be on public display briefly at the Ulster County Courthouse in Kingston, New York, the same court she had moved almost two centuries ago to seek justice, on Wednesday, from noon to 4 pm (local time), Ulster County Clerk's Office said in a Facebook post as it shared a news article related to the event.
“For decades, local historians believed that no documents from this historic case had survived, other than the Recognizance Bond issued by the Ulster County Court held in the Archives of the Ulster County Clerk. Or so we thought,” the article noted, adding: “Earlier this year, the original Petition and supporting documents from Sojourner Truth’s groundbreaking lawsuit – including her own Affidavit - were discovered in the New York State Archives in Albany.”
All these documents and the Recognizance Bond will be on public display for the first time in these 194 years. There will be eight hand-written pages, offering new details about the turning point in her eventful life, according to a report by news agency Associated Press. A state archivist spotted these court records in January this year while searching for something else, the report said.
The Story Of Sojourner Truth
Isabella was born around 1797 in the Hudson Valley in New York state, into slavery. At the time, non-White slaves accounted for a sizable population in many parts of the United States of America.
It was in 1826 that Isabella escaped her final owner after he went back on a promise to free her, according to records. While she took along her infant daughter, her minor son Peter was left behind.
Isabella then started to work for the family of Isaac Van Wagener, who “set her free” as New York state abolished slavery in 1827, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. She took the surname.
In the mean time, however, Peter had reached Alabama, sold into slavery. Had he been in New York, Peter would have been an indentured servant until he was older. The indentured system of bonded labour was instituted after the abolition of slavery. But Peter had been sold to another state, and it was illegal, according to the AP report.
With the help of two lawyers who allied with her, Isabella went to court in Kingston to get her son back, the AP report said, quoting Nell Irvin Painter, author of ‘Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol’.
On March 15, 1828, a Supreme Court commissioner ordered Peter to be freed, and the mother and son were finally reunited.
The reunion, however, came with its own share of sufferings. According to the AP report, Peter was a traumatised child, and his body bore marks of beatings. It took him some time to accept Isabella as his mother, who was supporting herself and the two children through domestic employment in New York City.
“He ended up, as many troubled young men did at that time, on a Nantucket whaling vessel, and he was finally lost at sea,” Painter was quoted as saying.
Isabella meanwhile joined missionary Elijah Pierson and his Retrenchment Society, working and preaching in the streets, the report added.
In 1843, she took the name Sojourner Truth. She widely travelled, singing, preaching, and debating at camps, in churches, and on streets, until her death in 1883.
What Happened To The Court Documents?
According to the AP report, court papers from the time had been shipped to Albany. They were transferred to the Court of Appeals founded in 1847 after a reorganisation of the state court system. For more than a century, the records stayed at the top court of New York, before they came to the New York State Archives in Albany in 1982.
In January this year, Jim Folts, head of researcher services at the archives, was looking for habeas corpus examples from that era for a book on New York’s courts, when he stumbled upon a box of documents from 1828 with a woman’s name on it. It startled him as this was unusual for the time. A certain ‘Isabella Van Wagenen’ trying to get son released from slavery rang a bell because it was was then “the name of the person who became known as Sojourner Truth”, Folts was quoted as saying in a recent interview at the archives.
“We always wondered, ‘Where were these records?’” Paul O’Neill, Ulster County’s commissioner of jurors, told AP.
According to the report, the papers including Isabella’s testimony were written in the way court documents read — full of law jargons. The woman born to slave parents could not read or write, so she just left an “X” next to her name on a page.
“This is her DNA left behind on this document… This is Sojourner Truth, this is where she shows up in this story,” State Archivist Thomas Ruller was quoted as saying in the AP report.
Sojourner Truth lives on, as she is remembered as the outspoken advocate for abolition and women's rights in the 19th century who is best known for her speech, "Ain't I a Woman?".
A bust of Truth was unveiled at the Emancipation Hall of the US Capitol in Washington in 2009.
In 2020, a statue of Truth along with two other eminent women's rights pioneers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton came up at New York’s Central Park, marking its first statue of real-life women.
Wednesday’s event at the Ulster County Courthouse will have Truth’s 6th great-granddaughter Barbara Allen in attendance, besides her biographer Nell Irvin Painter. The event is open to the public, and will also be livestreamed, as mentioned in the Facebook post cited above.
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