Nineteen-year-old Catherine Henderson asks the court through her father, Benjamin Henderson, a free man of color, to invalidate her sale as a slave for life. She additionally prays for an injunction to prevent her from being sold out of the District of Columbia. The petitioner states that she was sold by Hugh Smith to Harriet Loyed on the condition that she would be freed at age thirty. In violation of this agreement, the petitioner states, Loyed sold her to a slave trader named Freeman, who "now illegally and unjustly holds the Petitioner in close confinement, as his slave for life, and is about to remove her--out of the District of Columbia--for the purposes of trade &c." Henderson further argues that Freeman's plan to sell her violates an act passed in Maryland in 1796 which is still in force in the District of Columbia.
Result: Granted.
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Repository: National Archives, Washington, D. C.
