and
making no effort to bring him away, did not give to such slave a right
to freedom.[350] A slaveholder sent one of his servants over into
Illinois to cut some wood for a few weeks and later the latter brought
suit for freedom on the grounds of residence in a free State but the
court denied any such right, since the slave returned to his master in
Kentucky voluntarily.[351]

If an emancipated Negro for any reason was held in slavery and later
established his right to freedom in court, he could not recover
compensation for his services or damages for his detention, unless he
could prove that he was held under full knowledge of his right or with
good reason to believe him free. If pending his suit for freedom he
should be hired out by order of the court, the net hire was to be
awarded to him if he succeeded.[352]

The actual number of manumissions which took place in Kentucky will no
doubt never be known. Among the few statistics are those of the
federal census for 1850 and 1860 and they include only the figures for
the one census year. According to this source in 1850 only 152 slaves
were voluntarily set free in the State or one slave out of every
1,388, a percentage of only .072; and in 1860 there were 170 Negroes
recorded as freed or one out of every 1,281 slaves, a percentage of
only .078. We can easily assume from the accounts which we have from
papers of that time that these numbers were far short of those that
were really set free by their masters. It was the custom of many
owners who were about to free their slaves to take them to Cincinnati
and there have them set free in the Probate Court.

Early in 1859, forty-nine slaves from Fayette County, mostly women and
children, were brought to Cincinnati and set free and later sent to a
colony of emancipated Negroes in Green County, Ohio.[353] In March of
the same year Robert Barnet of Lincoln County, Kentucky appeared with
eighteen slaves--a father, mother, nine children and three
grandchildren and another woman and four boys, who were all
emancipated in the Cincinnati Probate Court. Before crossing the
Ohio, while in Covington, he was offered $20,000 for all of them but
he stated that he would refuse even $50,000.[354] In January, 1860,
William McGinnis, of Bourbon County, appeared with fourteen slaves
before the same probate court and set them all free.[355]

The law of Kentucky plainly provided that no slave was to be
emancipated unless bond were given that