Author, Human Rights Activist. Lucy Delaney was an American enslaved person who successfully gained her freedom in 1844 as the result of a lawsuit filed in 1842 on her behalf by her mother, Polly Wash. Later, she wrote an 1891 book about her experiences entitled "From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom." This is the only known book that gives a direct, first-person account of what it felt like to be an enslaved person petitioning for freedom. Her mother, Polly Wash, was born into slavery in Kentucky in about 1804. In October of 1817, when her mother was about 14 years old, she was taken to a free state about 4 miles south of Edwardsville, Illinois. In this state, the law stated that owners of slaves living in Illinois for longer than 90 days forfeited rights to their "property," and people they enslaved should be registered as "indentured," which legally made them freed. Afraid that they might lose their property, her mother was taken down the river to Missouri in April of 1818 and sold into slavery. At one point, her mother escaped on the Underground Railroad to Chicago but was later recaptured and returned to slavery. She had an older sister named Nancy. Since her mother was a slave at the time of her and her sister's birth, they were born into slavery under the property holdings of Major Taylor Berry and his wife, Fanny Christy. There are reports that Major Berry may have told Polly that she and her children would be freed after the death of him and his wife. Depending on the source, this may or may not have been mentioned in his will. On May 1, 1826, Major Berry's widow, Fannie, married Judge Robert Wash, a Missouri State Supreme Court judge, who became the owner of her and did not honor the promise of her freedom after Fannie's death on June 29, 1829, in Florida. In 1837, her sister, Nancy, was on a honeymoon trip with her owner's daughter in New York at Niagara Falls. Under instructions from her mother, Nancy was able to successfully escape to Canada. In 1839, her mother eventually managed to petition a Freedom Case on the grounds that she had lived for six months in Illinois as a teenager and, therefore, was a freed person. Under this premise, she was born to a free person and not to a slave. In 1842 her mother petitioned a Freedom Case for Lucy, her minor daughter, even though her own lawsuit was not yet resolved. Her mother won her lawsuit in 1843. In February of 1844, she gained her freedom under the legal precedent of "once free, always free" and the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem. Under this doctrine passed in Virginia in 1662, the status of all children born to an enslaved mother would follow the status of their mother. Her Freedom Case was argued in court by a prominent politician and slaveholder, Judge Edward Bates, who would eventually become the United States Attorney General in President Lincoln's cabinet. While waiting for trial, she was imprisoned at the request of her current owner for seventeen months under poor conditions, based on her owner's fear that she might try to escape. Her book enlightens readers about this experience as well. After the trial, she sued the family for cruelty and false imprisonment in jail under terrible conditions, but the case was dismissed without trial. Her book is reported to show some inaccuracies compared to legal documentation. She and her mother were two of 301 Freedom Cases filed in St. Louis from 1814 to 1860, which was one of the most in the slave-holding states. Following their freedom, she lived with her mother for the rest of her life, and both worked as seamstresses. Wash had a reputation for dividing his slave families. Lucy's father had been sold thousands of miles south when she was very young. After her mother's death, she found her father in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She, Nancy and their father did have a reunion, but her mother had already died after the American Civil War without ever seeing him again since he had been sold decades earlier. Her first marriage in 1845 was to Frederick Turner, who brought them from St. Louis to Illinois, but after Turner was killed in a steamboat accident in 1848, she and her mother returned to St. Louis. In 1849, she married Zachariah Delaney, a "cook on a boat." According to the 1900 Federal Census, she was the mother of 7 children with none living. The children enumerated in the 1860 and 1870 Federal Census were as follows: Charles, born about 1850; Mary, born about 1856; Lucy Ann, born about 1858; Lucinda, born about 1860; Howard, born about 1864; Jerome, born about 1868; and Charlotte, born about 1869. The Delaneys were married for 42 years. Lucy's birth year, per the Federal Census of 1900, was May of 1826.