Litchfield County Court records show that in the early fall of 1790, a 14-year-old girl named Violet was taken from her enslavers in Harwinton, Connecticut and transported to Cornwall, Vermont by individuals who may have been seeking to help her escape enslavement. According to the lawsuit David King vs. Stephen Welton filed in March 1791, King and Samuel Baldwin, both of Harwinton, claimed that “they owned & were legally possessed of a Negro girl named Violet a Slave for life about fourteen years of age well worth forty pounds” when the defendant, Welton, “with sundry other people did … carry the sd Negro Girl from sd Harwinton to Canaan in Litchfield County & from there cause sd Negro Girl to be carried to the State of Vermont where she was a long time.” Claiming they had been “much injured in their property,” that they had lost the “service of said girl” from September 28, 1790 until March 5, 1791, and that they had been “put to great trouble and expense to find out where said girl was,” King and Baldwin were seeking the “sum of thirty pounds lawful money to recover the same.” 

The court appears to have sided with the plaintiffs, but it is not clear what became of Violet. Census records taken after her supposed return do not show the presence of an enslaved person in either King’s or Baldwin’s household, though there was a free Person of Color in King’s household in 1800. Nor is it clear what Welton’s purpose was in helping Violet get to Vermont, but one theory is that he and the “sundry others” who assisted him were trying to get her to freedom. Vermont’s 1777 constitution, written a year after the Declaration of Independence, stated that “all men are born equally free and independent and have certain natural, inherent, and inalienable rights.” Article one of its state Constitution banned adult slavery.  In filing the court case detailing Violet’s experience, the Connecticut State Library described it as “not the only case that revealed anti-slavery activities.”