By Toby Webb
As Mother’s Day approaches, one document I found in the online archives of NGSQ haunts me. I mentioned it briefly in connection with Black History Month, but it speaks to every mother’s love.
Andrew Jackson Davis
[Box III, document 14; Court House Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis]
“Know all men by these presents that I [,] Julia Ann Davis [,] the Mother of Andrew Jackson Davis, a coloured boy slave aged about Twenty Five years [,] formerly owned by Stephen Barlow of the City of St. Louis, State of Missouri, and by him sold to Charles H. Haven of the same place, and by said Haven on May 30 18 50, sold to me by indenture of that date, having bought said Andrew in order to take care of and protect him, now in order that he may be able the more easily to make a living for himself and to make himself a free man.
“I hereby emancipate the said Andrew Jackson Davis from Slavery and make him as full and perfectly free as if such slave had been born free.
“In Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this first day of May AD 1855. [Signed] Julia Ann Davis. In prescence [sic] of John W. Skinner, E. Long, and J.A. Kapray [?].”
2 May 1855, proved by Julia Ann Davis in open court.
—Contributed by the Christopher A. Nordmann, PhD., CGRS; 2767A Mary Avenue; St. Louis , MO 63144
NGSQ 87 (March 1999):54.
Every mother hopes to give her child roots and wings. Happy Mother’s Day.
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