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Records show that Sam uel the nephew was deeply in debt. Old ledgers in th( Rappahannock court hous< include notations on loan af ter loan. For one debt o: $869, he even used tht slaves left to his uncle’s widow as collateral.
Apparently hearing word of Mary Maddox’s plar to lead Kitty, the three children and the two men away from Rappahannock, Samuel went to court for an injunction, barring her from taking from the county what he considered would be his property at some point in the future. Expressing doubt on the legality of his actiotis, Judge Jonathon Scott none the less granted the injunction.
The next day, May 2, 1843, Mary Maddox left Rappahannock with Ben, James, Kitty and the children.
Although court records here state that Mary again discharged Kitty and her children from servitude in Pennsylvania, filing a deed of manumission with a justice of the peace on January 21, 1844, Mahlbacker had been unable to turn up evidence of this. He has, however, found a manumission paper filed for in Adams County. James Green, one of the two men Mary brought from Rappahannock.
In the spring of 1845, Mary returned home and found work as the caretaker and housekeeper for John Cordder, an 84-year-old veteran of the Revolutionary War who was going blind. Mary, then 74, married Cordder that August.
It was that same month, that Kitty’s brief taste of freedom ended.
Under the headline “Gross Outrage,” The Pennsylvania Sentinel newspaper reports in its August 11th edition that slave catchers had captured Kitty and the children, “gagged them and placed them in a covered wagon.” The paper called on the governor of the state to initiate action to rescue the foursome.
The Gettysburg Compiler of August 18 described the slave catchers as the “harpies of Hagerstown, those who batten on human flesh — the worse than Cannibals of New Zealand”. The men who returned Kitty and her children to the “galling fetters of slavery” were “calculated and ready to do anything for money,” the Compiler reported. The leader of the group, Thomas Finnegan, a resident of Hagerstown and a professional slave catcher, kidnapped the mother and her babies “after prowling about like a wild beast which he very much resembles in appearance.” He was accompanied by
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