A Wife's Long Struggle for Freedom Ends in Divorce Court
A formerly enslaved woman who spent years earning money to buy her husband's freedom seeks divorce after he abandons her for another woman.
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Burlington Weekly Free Press · February 25, 1876 · Page 1
1 min readNEW ORLEANS.
An interesting divorce case came up in a New Orleans court the other day. The petition of the plaintiff, Fanny Hendricks, a colored woman, represents that she was married to one Charles Ross on the 8th of January, 1842, and that she has behaved herself as a good wife ever since.
She alleges that with her assistance they amassed several thousand dollars, with a portion of which her husband's freedom was purchased, he having been a slave; and that notwithstanding her labors to free her husband, he has taken to himself another, and left his helpmate of years alone and sorrowing.
There is something touching in the circumstances of the case. An old woman who has toiled for years to free herself and husband from slavery thus to be deserted, is a story savoring much of those cruel stories that novelists sometimes invent.
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