Nance Legins-Costley

Nance Legins-Costley is known to history as the first enslaved person Abraham Lincoln helped free. She was born in 1813 into indentured servitude in Kaskaskia, Illinois Territory, to slaves Randol and Annachy Legins. In 1827 in Springfield, Nance, a slave of Col. Thomas Cox, was auctioned and bought by Nathan Cromwell for $151, but she refused consent to the contract and was punished severely. She challenged her servitude in court, but in the Illinois Supreme Court case Nance v. Howard (1828) she was ruled the ward and servant of Cromwell, who brought her to Pekin in 1829. Cromwell sold Nance to David Bailey of Pekin, but when Nance said she had never consented to indentured servitude, Bailey allowed her to live nearby as a free woman. He declined to pay the promissory note after Cromwell's death in 1836 since Nance said she was free. Bailey was sued in Cromwell v. Bailey (1838) and lost, but he appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court in the landmark case Bailey v. Cromwell (1841), in which his attorney Abraham Lincoln argued successfully for the freedom of Nance and her first three children. Justice Sidney Breese affirmed Lincoln's legal reasoning relying on the language of the Northwest Ordinance and the Illinois Constitution, that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” may exist in Illinois. This affirmed Illinois' standing as a free state and helped close the indenture loophole by which slavery had endured. Nance married Benjamin Costley in Pekin and raised eight children. Their eldest son, William, was a Union Civil War soldier present at Juneteenth. In the 1870s, the Costleys moved to Peoria, where Ben died in 1883 and Nance in 1892. They and their son Leander are among the many buried in Moffatt Cemetery.