It's Against the Law to Harbor Another Man's Slave

My ggg grandfather Hosea Powers was born in Vermont in 1805.  He became Surveyor for St. Clair County, Michigan, in 1830, and was admitted to the bar in Michigan in 1832.  He became a medical doctor, married Adeline Maynard, and moved to Missouri in 1839.  As a surveyor, he helped lay out the town of Cole Camp, Missouri.  He was elected state senator in 1844 and served for five years.  He and Adeline had four daughters: Frances, Juliette, Sarah, and my gg grandmother Nancy.

Missouri was a slave state, and although Hosea didn't believe in slavery, he did acquire some.  He told his slaves that they could have their free papers whenever they wanted.  One named Bert took his and left the state.  Hosea's estate records list the slaves as Martha, Mandy, Lu, and Bob.  He had bought Lu at age10 for $250 after her Mother was sold to someone else, who didn't want the young girl.

One day Adeline discovered a young slave woman named Martha hiding in the spring house (built over a spring to keep food cold).  She had been mistreated by her owner, a Methodist preacher, and had run away. She had heard that Hosea Powers was a kind man.  Adeline told her, "It's against the law to harbor another man's slave", but that she would talk to her husband.  Hosea arranged to buy Martha from her owner for $1200, and she became part of the Powers family.

Hosea Powers died in 1856.  Adeline remarried; but died in 1860, leaving her daughters, ages 11 to 18, and a son, Charles Alexander.  Martha looked after the girls during the Civil War, paying the bills, and moved to Osceola, Missouri, in 1865.

In 1866, my gg grandmother Nancy Powers, age 17,  married Robert White, age 22, an itinerant plasterer, recently discharged from the Union Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  Robert and Nancy White were married sixty-six years, raised eight children, several foster children, and my grandmother Nina from age 5, after her own mother died of tuberculosis.

It seems strange to write about owning other people, but that's the history of the United States, and of a large percentage of the U. S. population, if they had family there prior to the Civil War.