Twenty-eight residents of Wayne County join the two owners of Sam and Sookey, "two aged persons of color," in requesting that the said slaves be freed. They aver that the enslaved couple "paid full prices for their freedom and by an honest, humble, sober, peaceable inoffensive and correct deportment through a long life gained the respect and confidence of those among whom they have lived." The petitioners avow that they "are now far advanced in life, Sam being above seventy years old and Sookey about sixty-eight" and that they are thus "too old to attempt to emigrate to a free country." They further note that Sam and Sookey "desire to spend the short remnant of their days in the County of their nativity, the home of their affection and the land of their birth."
Result: Rejected.
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Repository: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina
