John crenshaw biography

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He was tied to at least two kidnappings involving a total of seven children. In an editorial Publisher Samuel D. Marshall wrote that the "aged mother" and her children were handcuffed or tied, then placed into a wagon and driven out of the state by Kuykendall. Because the state's attorney could not prove what everyone knew, Crenshaw and Kuykendall were acquitted.
    Shawneetown attorney Henry Eddy fleshed out Marshall's story with more details in an 1846 letter to Gov.

Ford. Not until after the war did the practice stop. Thus, the jury could do nothing but acquit Crenshaw and Kuykendall.
    George Flower, a leader of the English Settlement in Edwards County, wrote about how hard it was to legally find a kidnapper guilty. We know because Crenshaw sued Davis four years later to get him to pay his part of the defense attorney's fees.

Nelson also received his freedom sometime during the 1830s, or at least by 1842. Although Smith wrote that White provided him with a lot of information, Smith never told who kidnapped White and the other children. (It should also be noted that the Salines, although along the Saline River, were often described as being along the Ohio River near the mouth of the Wabash.) Equality Cave on Cave Hill is just a few miles from both the salt works, and the land where Crenshaw lived as a teen.

The Black Code of 1819 allowed a fine of $1,000 to be levied on behalf of the victim, but did not provide for any criminal convictions. By that year, Ellen was also still working as an indentured servant, but likely in Michael K. Lawler's household where she was freed in 1845. Regrettably, we don't know if they were ever saved. Stories of strange noises upstairs coming from victims, date to 1851.

The jury acquitted his killer, Robert C. Sloo, on the grounds of temporary emotional insanity.
    Kidnapping continued in Southern Illinois up through the Civil War. At least one kidnapping took place near Marion in 1857, and kidnappers were named in Union County in 1859. The children of one of Crenshaw's brothers claimed that he cheated his nieces and nephews out of their share of their father's estate.

Crenshaw's Hickory Hill Plantation, which we know as the Old Slave House, is one of the few, if not the last, left. At the time, a thief could be whipped, but a kidnapper simply fined.

Either the parents, the children, or both, threw such a fit over being separated that Edwards agreed to send the children with the agent for a short time. The writings tell how Crenshaw kidnapped the family as charged and sold them to a slave trader named Lewis Kuykendall.
    Crenshaw was acquitted of that crime by a Gallatin County jury in 1842, but kidnapping was a hard crime to prove.

We don't know if they got an answer, but Crenshaw quickly had Nelson, Fox and Charles Adams, who wasn't even present, arrested and convicted of assault with the intent to murder.