Riverboats, Resistance, and the Law: Brown vs. Steamboat Cricket No. 2
Catlettsburg Steamboat Landing with wharf boat In the spring of 1862, Catlettsburg attorney George Newman Brown filed suit against the owners of the sternwheeler Cricket No. 2, accusing its crew of aiding the escape of two enslaved teenagers, Elizabeth and James. Brown, a son of Richard Brown and Frances Haney, was born on September 22, 1822, on the Brown Plantation in Cabell County, now part of present-day downtown Huntington, West Virginia. After studying at Marshall Academy and Augusta College, Kentucky, and reading law under his brother-in-law James M. Rice at Louisa, he was admitted to the bar in 1844. His political career advanced quickly: elected to the Kentucky legislature in 1849, then Pike County Attorney in 1852, a post he held until relocating to Catlettsburg in 1860. George Newman Brown Brown was born into a slaveholding family and continued that practice throughout his early career. In the 1850 Pike County, Kentucky Slave Schedule, he was enumerated with three ensla...