A formerly enslaved woman won the largest known restitution for American slavery — in 1878.
Henrietta Wood was born into slavery in Kentucky around 1820. By the early 1850s she had been freed and was living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1853, a deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward lured her across the river, abducted her, and sold her back into slavery in the Deep South.
She spent the next decade and a half enslaved on Texas and Mississippi plantations. After emancipation she made her way back to Cincinnati — and, in 1870, she sued the man who had stolen her freedom. She wanted $20,000: wages owed for years she had been forced to work without pay.
The case — Wood v. Ward — took eight years to reach trial in the United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of Ohio. On April 17, 1878, the all-white, all-male federal jury found for Wood and awarded her $2,500. It was a small fraction of what she had asked for, but it was real money in 1878 — the rough equivalent of $75,000 today — and Ward paid it.
Henrietta Wood used the judgment to buy a home and to send her son, Arthur, to school. He graduated from Northwestern University, then from its law school, and became one of the first Black lawyers in Chicago.
To this day, no individual victim of American slavery has been awarded more in a U.S. court of law. The case sat in obscurity for more than a century until the historian W. Caleb McDaniel reconstructed it from court records and pension files for his 2019 book Sweet Taste of Liberty, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History the following year.
The modern reparations debate often proceeds as if no American court has ever ordered restitution for slavery. That is not quite true. A federal jury did it once — in Cincinnati, in 1878 — and the precedent has been sitting in the U.S. Reports for nearly 150 years. Henrietta Wood didn't win because the law was on her side. She won because she would not stop telling the truth, and she found lawyers willing to file it.
- McDaniel, W. Caleb. Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America. Oxford University Press, 2019. Awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History.
- Wood v. Ward, U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of Ohio, verdict April 17, 1878.
- Henrietta Wood's first-person narrative, as told to journalist Lafcadio Hearn, published in The Ripley Bee, April 2 and April 9, 1876.