Various Formerly Enslaved Women

(early-1830s – c. 1926)

It is easy to consider the abolitionist origins of this community as merely an abstraction that was directed outward (and southward) to those regions where the "peculiar institution" of slavery thrived but it was more than this. From the time when the first pioneers arrived in Walnut Grove in 1831 and throughout the subsequent century, residents of this community lived among friends and neighbors who had once been enslaved. Such a face-to-face encounter with historical reality challenged the early settlers to affirm their abolitionist values as they saw worth and dignity in all people.

Women who had been enslaved knew of a type of subjugation like no other. In their marginalized status they were often unable to defend themselves and their children from the whims of callous overseers and owners who often exploited and abused the purported power they held over their chattel property. Denied any essence of dignity with their slave marriages unrecognized by southern courts, enslaved women could only dream of the day when they would hear the cherished appellation of Mrs. applied to their names. Enslaved women could only imagine freedom in the era before emancipation.

When Ben Major moved his family to Walnut Grove, Illinois, in 1831, he also transported several former slaves that he had inherited from his father. Major manumitted (freed) these individuals and provided for their education so that they could eventually travel to the American Colonization Society's settlement in Liberia. In 1835 the brig Luna transported several of these former Major family slaves to Bassa Cove, Liberia, and letters sent back to Walnut Grove from Liberia shared the experiences of the African Majors with the American Majors. Four women were included in this group of Major family slaves—Ann, Mary, Silvey, and Caroline—and they likely lived briefly in Walnut Grove before being sent to Virginia and then on to Liberia.

In the early-1840s enslaved parents who took the name Strother arranged to purchase their freedom, along with that of their three children, so that they could become a free family. One of the terms of the arrangement that Mrs. Strother accepted was that she would provide $50 to fund the education of her white mistress's daughter and would continue to provide annual payments for a number of years thereafter. Mrs. Strother had to work as a laundry woman in Peoria, Illinois, to fund the education of a white child in Lexington, Missouri, while she was unable to provide for the education of her own children.

Her son David eventually worked as a cook on steamboats that plied the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. During the Civil War he was hired on as the cook for Company G of the 17th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, the company whose organization had been initiated under the "Recruiting Elm" at Eureka College. Strother traveled through the South with Captain Otis Asa Burgess and the young men from Eureka College throughout the war. When the Civil War ended he settled in El Paso, Illinois, where he established himself as a barber. On April 4, 1870, David Strother became the first African American in Illinois (and likely the second in the nation) to vote after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1897, he became the first African American in Illinois to serve on a jury when he was involved in a case that was tried in the brand new Woodford County Courthouse in Eureka. Mrs. Strother would have been proud.

Robert Moody was born a free black man because his mother was a free woman (his father was enslaved) in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Moody would later purchase his own father for $250 in order to set him free and establish him in a black township in Western Ontario, Canada. During the Civil War Moody worked as a scout for the Union Army as it advanced through Tennessee. He met and fell in love with an enslaved woman named Sarah and he helped her to escape (to "steal herself away from slavery").

After the Civil War ended, Robert and Sarah Moody established a home in Eureka, Illinois, and raised a family of eight children. Robert established a business as a brick maker and built a home just south of Olio Cemetery (along what is now called Moody Street). The Moodys were prominent and respected members of the Eureka community.

From her front parlor window Sarah Moody could see the Civil War Monument in Olio Cemetery and she could see the scattered graves of the young men who had fought and died in that war to effect emancipation. She also knew that she was living in a community that had been founded by abolitionists and one where Father Lincoln had trod. She was a free woman and above all things, her children would have lives that were better than hers had been.

Some of Sarah's daughters attended Eureka College in the 1890s. One daughter, Harriet, eventually married a fellow Eureka College student, Arnold Nathaniel Shirley, and the Shirleys became Christian missionaries in Jamaica. Buoyed by the opportunities that her children realized in Eureka, Sarah Moody understood the meaning of freedom more than most could ever imagine.

In a famous woman's rights address that Sojourner Truth presented in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, she had posed the question "Aren't I a woman?" Certainly the lives of Ann, Mary, Silvey, Caroline, Mrs. Strother, and Sarah Moody all attest an affirmation to Truth's question. Simple lives rooted in the hope of a better tomorrow all demonstrated that these women who overcame much hardship lived lives of dignity and distinction.