Is the first slave freed by Lincoln under a parking lot?
Twenty-two years before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he won an Illinois State Supreme Court case that freed Nance Legins-Costley.
Legins-Costley was an indentured servant in the eyes of the law, but, by all rights, she was a slave. She’d never been free. Neither she nor anyone else ever signed paperwork giving up her liberty. Nonetheless, she was bought and sold, first while still in the womb, when an Illinois state senator bought her parents. But the state Supreme Court ruled her a free woman after Lincoln took up her cause as a lawyer.
“It is a presumption of law, in the state of Illinois, that every person is free, without regard to color,” the court ruled. “The sale of a free person is illegal.”
Carl Adams, a former Alton resident who’s written a book about Legins-Costley, has been looking for her grave since the 1990s. Finally, he says he’s found it, thanks to help from a cast of amateur historians, a librarian and a dedicated genealogist. Legins-Costley, it turns out, may be beneath a Peoria parking lot, next to a muffler shop, alongside Civil War veterans and others whose graves were forgotten over the years.
Adams says the parking lot deserves a memorial. “Because she was the first slave freed by Abraham Lincoln, I think it should be 50 feet tall,” Adams says.
Read more: https://illinoistimes.com/article-21450-is-the-first-slave-freed-by-lincoln-under-a-parking-lot.html