REDEMPTION SONGS, EXCERPT....

Deeper than Sherlock Holmes' detective stories, deeper than Nancy Drew's mysteries, or any other work of acclaimed fiction, is the actual history of Peter McNelly and Queen, his wife, two slaves who sued for and won their freedom under the 1787 "Northwest Ordinance," the first to do so, by early territorial courts' judges. Their breathtaking history was dug up by University of Iowa law professor, Lea Vandevelde, in her simply amazing book, REDEMPTION SONGS : SUING FOR FREEDOM BEFORE DRED SCOTT (2014). Finding such "first freedom suit records" was more than mildly problematic. It was more like finding a proverbial needle in a very large haystack, she writes. Although some early archival papers were available in territorial courts' records such as "sales contracts, land sales, probates, and other lawsuits--these records were conspicuously missing." Then came her breakthrough ! "On one frosty day in December 2011, the very same day that my resourceful reference librarian received the final communique that we had emptied the last official pocket and the records were not available anywhere , I found what I was seeking. That day, legend and folklore took the definite shape of historical fact. I discovered authentic documents in the form of six signed, firsthand, eyewitness depositions, including the ultimate prize: a particularly detailed deposition by the enslaved man, Peter McNelly himself, the first slave suing for freedom and for the freedom of his wife, Queen. The first redemption song. "The records were discovered where they would never have been expected. They were discovered among the personal papers of a nineteenth century man who knew their importance and had intended to write the history of these cases himself but never completed the task.... The manuscript was never published. And the original records were never returned to the state [of Indiana]. William H. English died in 1895, and his heirs held the records for almost thirty years before donating them to the University of Chicago in 1924. Yet, understood as a collection of research papers of an Indiana politician, their full importance for American history and the law of the frontier was never realized . ... "There was the case of "Peter McNelly v. Henry Vanderburgh," complete with the six corroborating depositions of the circumstances that led Peter and Queen to claim freedom under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and details of the kidnapping that resulted immediately thereafter . "Discovering Peter McNelly's identity led to more discoveries: Peter McNelly was not only the first freedom litigant under the Northwest Ordinance , he had also been a soldier in the Revolutionary War. Learning his identity led to a Revolutionary War pension file with additional information about the sweep of his life." P. 24-25