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“My Children Held as Slaves” d D 75 them with sufficient meat, drink or apparel. . . .’’ He feared “the treatment that they now receive will materially injure their health, and eventually cause their death, or be the cause of their enduring great suffering.’’4 Holmes vs. Ford, Day-by-Day APRIL 16, 1852 (THE FIRST DAY) Robin Holmes initiates his fifteen-month case against Nathaniel Ford by filing a writ of habeas corpus in Second District Court in Polk County, seeking the return of his “unlawfully detained’’ children. The intent of the writ is to require Ford to bring the children to court and explain under what authority he is holding them. If Ford fails to satisfy the court, he likely will be compelled to return the children to Holmes, or so Holmes hopes. According to the initial brief court record, Ford “admits that he detained’’ the children. While there’s no record of who is physically present in the courtroom, Ford and Holmes apparently are both there. How odd it must seem to both men to be, at least at this moment, equals before the law, the one accustomed to giving orders, the other to taking orders. Is there eye contact? Angry stares from Ford? Or do they ignore one another’s presence? Hearing the case is Judge O. C. Pratt, an associate justice of the Territorial Supreme Court. He orders Ford to bring the children to court at the next term as a first step toward adjudicating the dispute. Holmes and his wife live several miles from Ford at Nesmith Mills, where Holmes is employed. APRIL 17, 1852 The sheriff of Polk County, Washington Smith Gilliam, serves the writ on Ford. However, the case will languish, and won’t resume in earnest until the following April. Sheriff Gilliam is the son of Cornelius Gilliam, who led the wagon train that traveled alongside Ford’s train in 1844. The young Gilliam no doubt became well acquainted with Ford on the journey west. He may remember Holmes as the slave accompanying Ford. Subsequent records and testimony will be far more detailed than the initial record: Holmes will argue; Ford will respond; Ford will argue; Holmes will 76 d D Breaking Chains respond, and so on. Of the three Holmes children, most of the focus is on the eldest, Mary Jane—called “Jenny’’ by the Ford family. APRIL 5, 1853 Ford waits nearly a year before responding to Holmes’ writ. In a detailed affidavit, Ford claims his intentions are not to keep the children as slaves, but as “wards.’’ He acknowledges he had considered, but rejected, the possibility of returning the entire Holmes family to Missouri to be sold back into slavery. He claims that after Holmes returned from California, they reached an agreement in early March of 1850 whereby “the said Robin and his wife were to be and remain henceforth free’’ with their youngest child, while Ford was “to keep all the rest of said children together with one who has since died’’—a reference to Harriett—“and to hold them until they respectively became of age,’’ which was twenty years for males and eighteen for females. He leaves no doubt he intends to put them to work. That this respondent [Ford] has kept the said children at a heavy expense when they were young and their services of very little or no value—and now since they have arrived at an age when their services will be of some consequence the respondent insists that he has a right to retain the said children during their minority as part compensation and remuneration for the expenditure made in their behalf. Ford attacks the Holmeses as unfit parents. Robin, in particular, Ford says, “is poor and ignorant and unfit to have the care, custody and bringing up of said children.’’ Ford might be trying to make a case for guardianship. Oregon’s territorial law provides that a court may appoint a guardian for a minor “if the father of a minor be insane, or be incapable, from want of understanding, to take care and provide for such minor,’’ but only after an inquest to determine the father’s mental health.1 However, there is no record of Ford applying for an inquest or to have himself declared a guardian. Perhaps he hopes the judge will steer the case in that direction. Chief Justice Thomas Nelson of Oregon’s Territorial Supreme Court is now hearing the case. Nelson is the same justice who...

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