Henrietta Wood

Henrietta Wood was born into slavery in northern Kentucky around 1818, the property of the Tousey family. She was sold and re-sold across her early adult life until 1848, when her then-owner Henry Forsyth manumitted her in Cincinnati, Ohio — a free state. She remained in Cincinnati and worked as a domestic servant for the next five years.

In April 1853 — five years after her manumission — Wood was kidnapped on the streets of Cincinnati by Zebulon Ward, a Kentucky slaveholder who had purchased her manumitting papers (which Wood's former employer had retained for safekeeping) from another party. Ward transported her across the Ohio River and sold her south into Texas slavery. She was held there for the next sixteen years — through the entire American Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery — until her then-owner allowed her to leave around 1869.

She returned to Cincinnati in 1869 at approximately fifty-one and traced Zebulon Ward to his postwar residence in Arkansas. In 1870 she filed Wood v. Ward in the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of Ohio, suing Ward for twenty thousand dollars in damages for kidnapping and unjust enslavement.

The case went to trial in April 1878. The jury found for Wood and awarded her two thousand five hundred dollars in compensatory damages — the largest jury verdict for compensation of enslavement in U.S. judicial history. Ward appealed; the appellate court affirmed the verdict; Wood collected the full award.

She used the award to support her son Arthur Hodges Simms through law school. Simms became a successful Chicago lawyer; through his subsequent career, the Wood reparations money became the founding capital of a multi-generation Black middle-class family lineage.

She died at her son's home in Chicago on the third of June 1912, age approximately ninety-four.

She is honored here as the formerly enslaved woman whose 1878 court verdict remains the single largest individual reparations award in U.S. history.