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12 SMITHSONIAN.COM | September 2019

In 1870 Henrietta Wood sued for

reparations—and won the largest

verdict ever awarded for slavery

Illustration by

Cliff Alejandro

By

W. Caleb McDaniel

O

N APRIL 17, 1878, twelve white jurors en-

tered a federal courtroom in Cincinna-

ti, Ohio, to deliver the verdict in a now-

forgotten lawsuit about American slav-

ery. The plaintiff was Henrietta Wood,

described by a reporter at the time as “a

spectacled negro woman, apparently six-

ty years old.” The defendant was Zebulon

Ward, a white man who had enslaved Wood

25 years before. She was suing him for $20,000 in reparations.

Two days earlier, the jury had watched as Wood took the

The Nation’s

Unsettled

Account

JUSTICE

No image of Henrietta Wood survives today, but her story is recorded in court fi lings, including the verdict slip above.