whatever status he had then was to be determined by the law of Kentucky and not by the rule of any State where the slave might have been.[349] The fact that a slave stayed in New York for three months before his return to Kentucky, his owner knowing he was there, and making no effort to bring him away, did not give to such slave a right to freedom.[350] A slaveholder sent one of his servants over into Illinois to cut some wood for a few weeks and later the latter brought suit for freedom on the grounds of residence in a free State but the court denied any such right, since the slave returned to his master in Kentucky voluntarily.[351] If an emancipated Negro for any reason was held in slavery and later established his right to freedom in court, he could not recover compensation for his services or damages for his detention, unless he could prove that he was held under full knowledge of his right or with good reason to believe him free. If pending his suit for freedom he should be hired out by order of the court, the net hire was to be awarded to him if he succeeded.[352] The actual number of manumissions which took place in Kentucky will no doubt never be known. Among the few statistics are those of the federal census for 1850 and 1860 and they include only the figures for the one census year. According to this source in 1850 only 152 slaves were voluntarily set free in the State or one slave out of every 1,388, a percentage of only .072; and in 1860 there were 170 Negroes recorded as freed or one out of every 1,281 slaves, a percentage of only .078. We can easily assume from the accounts which we have from papers of that time that these numbers were far short of those that were really set free by their masters. It was the custom of many owners who were about to free their slaves to take them to Cincinnati and there have them set free in the Probate Court. Early in 1859, forty-nine slaves from Fayette County, mostly women and children, were brought to Cincinnati and set free and later sent to a colony of emancipated Negroes in Green County, Ohio.[353] In March of the same year Robert Barnet of Lincoln County, Kentucky appeared with eighteen slaves--a father, mother, nine children and three grandchildren and another woman and four boys, who were all emancipated in the Cincinnati Probate Court. Before crossing the Ohio, while in Covington, he was offered $20,000 for all of them but he stated that he would refuse even $50,000.[354] In January, 1860, William McGinnis, of Bourbon County, appeared with fourteen slaves before the same probate court and set them all free.[355]