Abraham Rencher asks for compensation for his slave Emeline, who escaped to the "free states of the North" in July 1846 with her husband Mike and her two-year-old daughter. Hired out in Chapel Hill, the black family traveled to Henderson, met a white man named Nelson, "a northern interloper" who posed as their owner, and boarded a passenger car of the Raleigh and Gaston Rail Road and rode to freedom. The petitioners assert that the agents of the railroad company should have demanded "proper indemnity for the true owners" and that the railroad was therefore legally responsible for the slaves. Mike's owner took the case to the Board of Commissioners in 1847, but it was dismissed on the grounds that the Board did not have the authority to pay the claim. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, one of the owners and an authorized agent for the other journeyed to the North to recapture the slaves but failed. As a last resort, the owners seek assistance from the General Assembly.
Result: Rejection of the resolution with investigation.
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Repository: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina
