For a long time, the story of the Pekin woman whose historic legal battle to secure her freedom from slavery was all but forgotten. Now, she's getting recognition on both sides of the Illinois River.
Earlier this week, a marker erected near the site of the former Moffatt Cemetery noting the final resting place of Legins-Costley was dedicated as part of the new Freedom and Remembrance Memorial in south Peoria. Now, a pocket park in the city she called home for decades also bears her name, and that of her son, William.
The park in the 400 block of Court Street was dedicated during Tazewell County's Juneteenth celebration on Saturday.
Legins-Costley, a Black woman, was born in 1813 in Kaskaskia, then the capital of Illinois. She began fighting for her freedom from involuntary indentured servitude when she was a teenager. Though Illinois was ostensibly a free state, indentured servitude often served as a convenient smokescreen for what was really slavery in all but name.
Her lengthy legal battle ultimately culminated in an 1841 Illinois Supreme Court decision declaring that she and her children were free. A young Abraham Lincoln represented her in the case.
Carl Adams is author of Nance: Trials of the First Slave Freed by Abraham Lincoln.
"She was always firmly determined for her own civil rights, and the civil rights of her family. That is Nancy's legacy, and is a legacy that we all benefit from. She was the only known African American who managed to get to any state Supreme Court three times," Adams said.
Jared Olar of the Pekin Public Library has researched the history of Nance and her descendants. He said Nance and her husband raised eight children in Pekin on land she purchased for $10 in 1849. Their cabin lay near the present site of Amanda and Sommerset streets.
She and her husband lived in Pekin for nearly half a century. After he died, she lived for a time with her kids in Peoria, and in Minneapolis.
Her son William served as a Union soldier during the Civil War, and was present at Galveston, Texas during the first Juneteenth in 1865. He later was acquitted for murder by an all-white jury in Pekin after fatally shooting a white man who was battering his wife in the middle of the street.
"That precedent that was set in 1841 (with) Bailey versus Cromwell, which is still on the books today, that helped to secure Illinois as the free state that it claimed to be, but it wasn't," Olar said. "All of this is due to the family, is due to Nance Costley, and it's due to the bravery and self sacrifice of Private William Henry Costley.
Illinois Supreme Court Justice Lisa Holder White was the keynote speaker at Saturday's dedication. She is the first Black woman to serve on the state's high court.
"The irony of me being the person from the Supreme Court of Illinois here with you today leaves me humbled and grateful. Nance's positive contributions to mankind simply cannot be overstated," she said.
The pocket park also has two Illinois State Historical Society markers sharing the stories of Nance and her son, and a new stone monument.
