In a few cases claims of ownership were resurrected after a long lapse.  That of Alexander Pierre, a New Orleans negro who had always passed as free-born, was the consequence of an affray in which he had worsted another black.  In revenge the defeated combatant made the fact known that Pierre was the son of a blind girl who because of her lack of market value had been left by her master many years before to shift for herself when he had sold his other slaves and gone to France.  Thereupon George Heno, the heir of the departed and now deceased proprietor, laid claim to the whole Pierre group, comprising the blind mother, Alexander himself, his sister, and that sister’s two children.  Whether Heno’s proceedings at law to procure possession succeeded or failed is not told in the available record.[61] In a kindred case not long afterward, however, the cause of liberty triumphed.  About 1807 Simon Porche of Point Coupee Parish had permitted his slave Eulalie to marry his wife’s illegitimate mulatto half-brother; and thereafter she and her children and grand-children dwelt in virtual freedom.  After Porche’s death his widow, failing in an attempt to get official sanction for the manumission of Eulalie and her offspring and desiring the effort to be renewed in case of her own death, made a nominal sale of them to a relative under pledge of emancipation.  When this man proved recreant and sold the group, now numbering seventeen souls, and the purchasers undertook possession, the case was litigated as a suit for freedom.  Decision was rendered for the plaintiff, after appeal to the state supreme court, on the ground of prescriptive right.  This outcome was in strict accord with the law of Louisiana providing that “If a master shall suffer a slave to enjoy his liberty for ten years during his residence in this state, or for twenty years while out of it, he shall lose all right of action to recover possession of the said slave, unless said slave shall be a runaway or fugitive."[62]

[Footnote 61:  New Orleans Daily Delta, May 25, 1849.]

[Footnote 62:  E.P.  Puckett, “The Free Negro in Louisiana” (MS.), citing the New Orleans True Delta, Dec. 16, 1854.]

Kidnappings without pretense of legal claim were done so furtively that they seldom attained record unless the victims had recourse to the courts; and this was made rare by the helplessness of childhood in some cases and in others by the fear of lashes.  Indeed when complexion gave presumption of slave status, as it did, and custody gave color of ownership, the prospect of redress through the law was faint unless the services of some white friend could be enlisted.  Two cases made conspicuous by the publication of elaborate narratives were those of Peter Still and Solomon Northrup.  The former, kidnapped in childhood near Philadelphia, served as a slave some forty years in Kentucky and northern Alabama, until with his own savings he bought his freedom and returned to his boyhood home.