LEOMINSTER Local historian Mark Bodanza is thrilled to welcome the community this coming Saturday, as he leads tours of the historic Drake House, the Franklin Street home that was on the front lines of fighting against slavery and the women’s suffrage movement. This event, which is being held from 10 a.m.-noon on Feb. 17, […]
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Congress banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. But the domestic slave trade trading humans within the nation’s borders, dubbed “the Second Middle Passage” continued through the Civil War and is much less discussed in American history. The Norfolk region sent more than 21,000 enslaved people to New Orleans more than any other port, according to the new research of a Slover librarian.
lean and
hard,
bad face, and
ugly, not only in form and feature, but expression.” Caphart arrived armed with papers issued by a Virginia court testifying to Minkins’s various owners. The papers estimated Minkins’s age to be twenty-five or twenty-six, his height five-feet-seven, his complexion “bacon color,” and his build “stout” and “square.”
Caphart sought and received an arrest warrant from George T. Curtis, a designated federal commissioner who would later serve as co-counsel to Dred Scott in his appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. On February 14, the assistant deputy marshal, Patrick Riley, was charged with executing the warrant. The next morning, he sent deputies to Cornhill Coffee House where, with the assistance of a traveling circus worker named Charles G. Forbes, they positively identified Minkins. Although Minkins didn’t resist his arrest, after being escorted across Court Square to the courthouse, a deputy observed him uttering “wild remonstr