Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 6 · column 3 of 9 · from the scan, no model involved
In February, 1982, the Rappahannock News told the story of Kitty Payne, the slave of\one Samuel Maddox. It was a tragic story, pieced together from court records of almost a century and a half ago.
When Samuel Maddox died in the fall of 1837, he bequeathed his mullato slave Kitty and her three children, Mary, Eliza Jane and James Arthur, to his wife, Mary. His will specified that “if there should be anything left at the death of my wife,” a nephew, also named Samuel, would inherit the remainder of the estate.
In February, 1843, Mary Maddox executed a deed of emancipation that freed Kitty, her three children, and two other slaves, 53year-old Ben and 37-yearold James. She took Kitty and her babes and the two men to Pennsylvania and settled them in that free state.
But their freedom was short lived. Samuel Maddox, the nephew, and four or five other white men rode into Pennsylvania’s Menallan township in the early hours one fall morning in 1845 and carried Kitty and her children back to Rappahannock — and slavery.
She tried to fight her way out of bondage, bringing suit against Samuel Maddox for kidnapping and their illegally detention as slaves. But a judge and jury found that Mary Maddox never had a right to free Kitty and her family since she’d never legally held title to the slaves in the first place. It all hung on a legal technicality — Mary Maddox failed to qualify as executrix of her late husband’s estate before she issued that deed of emancipation. According to Rappahannock justice, Maddox was returning an escaped slave and her children to their rightful place.
There the story ended. Court records told nothing of the rest of Kitty Payne’s life — whether she was sold, whether she lived to see freedom again at the end of the Civil War, whether she was able to hold her little family together. Bob Mahlbacker read the News’ account and saw the raw material for a play, maybe even a novel. For the past year, he has burrowed into the past, pouring over court records here and in Pennsylvania, retracing the path of the kidnappers, unearthing accounts from newspaper morgues, interviewing descendants of Samuel Maddox. He has answered some of the questions about what happened to the characters n this real life drama; others -emain a mystery.
90.4%