Hannah Toliver
Black woman who helped escaped slaves in 1863 from Kentucky to Indiana.
Hannah Toliver (born Hannah Coleman, c.1826-1835) was a freed Black woman in Jeffersonville, Indiana, who aided an enslaved person with escaping to freedom. Toliver was arrested and sentenced to prison in Kentucky, in 1864. She received a pardon in 1865.
Life
Toliver was born in Kentucky around 1830, as Hannah Coleman. She worked as a washerwoman before and after being enslaved. On September 5, 1849, she married boatman George Toliver in Orange County, Indiana. The two then moved and lived in Jeffersonville, Indiana, by 1850.
Legacy
After the establishment of the Emancipation Proclamation, there were still enslaved Black people in the United States. Toliver and her husband worked to free enslaved people in the South, taking them from Kentucky to Indiana.
Toliver was arrested in Kentucky in early 1864 for aiding an enslaved person and was sentenced to 7 years in the Kentucky State Penitentiary.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Hannah Toliver” as black woman who helped escaped slaves in 1863 from Kentucky to Indiana. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q140473453. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1826, 1835, 1864 and 1865.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hannah Toliver” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.