(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION) Legal case file involving 5 slaves s

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(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) Legal case file involving 5 slaves sold between American Indians in Texas. 19 manuscript pages on 19 loose sheets, 12 1/4 x 7 3/4 inches; foxing, minor wear. Grayson County, TX, January to November 1848

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Benjamin Love (1795-1849) was a Chickasaw from Mississippi who settled in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1841; he worked as a federal interpreter and owned several slaves. In this case, he was sued by the merchants Josiah S. Doak and Vincent B. Tims over the ownership of five people--Maria Maryann, Margaret, Catherine, Leonidas, and Caledonia--for whom he had allegedly failed to make payments. This packet includes contemporary transcripts of several documents. One of them describes the defendant Love as "a citizen of the Chickasaw district of the Choctaw Nation" and one plaintiff Tims as "a citizen of the town of Doaksville, Choctaw Nation." The other plaintiff, Doak, was a resident of nearby Red River County, TX. The sale took place in nearby Grayson County, TX just after the close of the Mexican War. In 1849, the year after this case, Love moved to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and was murdered soon afterward. While slavery in the United States was almost always a matter of black and white, cases like this remind us that the racial lines of the institution were not always so clearly drawn.