Historic Black Settlements of Ohio by David Meyers

Author:David Meyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

NEWLIN COLONY (RUSHCREEK TOWNSHIP)

John Newlin became a slave owner for the express purpose of freeing them. A “merchant, industrialist, land speculator, abolitionist, and Quaker leader, [John] was born in the southeastern part of present-day Alamance County [North Carolina].”249 He used only hired workers in his many successful enterprises and was an outspoken opponent of slavery. John was also an active member of the Manumission Society of North Carolina, assisting slave owners in liberating their slaves. Usually, this involved a lot of legal wrangling because of North Carolina’s laws governing such matters.

When her first husband died, Sarah Foust Freeman inherited twenty-five to forty slaves. Although they had discussed freeing them, her late husband had never gotten around to doing so. Before she entered into a second marriage, “she and her prospective husband signed an agreement that left her in complete control of her slaves and other property.”250 After she remarried, Sarah revised her will to leave her slaves to John Newlin, having previously arranged with him to take them to a free state and give them their freedom.

However, when Sarah passed away in 1839, a number of would-be heirs stepped forward and filed a blizzard of lawsuits in an attempt to break the will and claim the slaves. Three of the lawsuits eventually made their way to the North Carolina Supreme Court, the last in 1851. During the ensuing twelve years, John had been prevented from acting upon Sarah’s wishes. He also, apparently, put the slaves to work in order to pay for their own upkeep, but there is no evidence that he personally profited from their labor.

Finally, the court ruled in John’s favor, and he was able to remove the slaves to Logan County where “from motives of benevolence and humanity have manumitted and set free from slavery and bonds of servitude”—fortytwo in all.251 Most went by the surname Newlin, but a few adopted Burnett, Carter and Nichols. The Newlins did not make a good impression. “They were directly from a state of slavery,” the author of a county history wrote in 1880, “having been manumitted by their master by will. As a class, they were much inferior to the colored people hitherto in the country, being sadly addicted to the use of intoxicating drinks.”252

This rather harsh assessment is borne out by a series of newspaper articles chronicling their criminal behavior, which culminated in the lynching of Seymour Newlin. (It may have been a case of mistaken identity.)253 However, by 1900, there were Newlins in Rushcreek, Monroe, Perry and Brokencreek Townships in Logan County.

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