Atherton, Lewis E. “Life, Labor, and Society in Boone County, Missouri, 1834-1852, As Revealed in the Correspondence of an Immigrant Slave Owning Family from North Carolina.” Part 1. Missouri Historical Review 93 (Oct. 1998): 49-73. [WEB]
Hamm, Thomas. “A Quaker View of Black St. Louis in 1841.” Missouri Historical Review 98 (Jan. 2004): 115-120. [WEB]
Hurt, R. Douglas. “Planters and Slavery in Little Dixie.” Missouri Historical Review 88 (July 1994): 397-415. [WEB]
Merkel, Benjamin G. “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders, 1840-1860.” Missouri Historical Review, 37 (April 1943): 271-85. [WEB]
Roberts, Anna K. “Crossing Jordan: The Mississippi River in the Black Experience in Greater St. Louis, 1815–1860.” Missouri Historical Review 113 (Oct. 2018): 22-40. [WEB]
Willoughby, Robert J. “‘I’ll Wade in Missouri Blood’: Daggs v. Frazier: A Case of Missouri Runaway Slaves.” Missouri Historical Review 99 (Jan. 2005): 115-138. [WEB]
Atherton, Lewis E. “Life, Labor, and Society in Boone County, Missouri, 1834-1852, As Revealed in the Correspondence of an Immigrant Slave Owning Family from North Carolina.” Part 1. Missouri Historical Review 93 (Oct. 1998): 49-73. [WEB]
Atherton includes letters written by members of the slave owning Lenoir family who emigrated to Boone County, Missouri from North Carolina. Atherton suggests that accounts from this family are representative of property-owning families who moved west in search of economic prosperity. He prefaced the letters by explaining that these documents, while important for historical analysis, should not always be taken at face value because they provide subjective accounts of their experiences. The letters provided were written by members of the Lenoir family who moved to Missouri to family members who remained home in North Carolina. In these letters, they described the current state of affairs in Missouri with regard to the agricultural and commercial markets, the slave market, the cholera outbreak, education, and even the general scenery and the people they befriended.
There is no mention of slave stampedes or any group escape and slavery is only really mentioned in the letters when they refer to buying or selling slaves for agricultural work or to make a profit.
Hamm, Thomas. “A Quaker View of Black St. Louis in 1841.” Missouri Historical Review 98 (Jan. 2004): 115-120. [WEB]
In “A Quaker View of Black St. Louis in 1841,” Thomas D. Hamm provides accounts from Quaker Minister Gershom Perdue’s journal, in which he documents his travels to other Quaker Settlements in Ohio and black churches in St. Louis, Missouri. Perdue’s journal entries indicate his concern for African Americans, which is consistent with Quakers more generally at this time. At Quaker Friends meetings, they discussed the issues facing African Americans and established a “Committee on Concerns of People of Color” that provided financial support for freedom seekers. Perdue specifically describes encounters with John Berry Meachum, the African American minister of the “Baptist Church for Colored People” in St. Louis. In 1848, Meachum brought Perdue along with his family to his church and Perdue describes feeling warmly welcomed by the “dispised people” there. From this point on, Perdue became interested in learning more about Meachum’s background. He discovered that Meachum was born enslaved, but paid for his freedom and eventually paid for the freedom of his entire family with money he saved from working. He bought freedom for 20 other enslaved African Americans and provided them with work so that they could eventually pay him back. Perdue also provided an account of how Meachum’s Baptist church in St. Louis began. It first started in 1818 as a day school that required the permission of slaveholders for their slaves to attend. It evolved into an independent organization and by 1827, they built their own meeting house and no longer required supervision by white slaveholders. Perdue died in New Martinsburg, Ohio in 1885.
There was no mention of a stampede or any variant, nor does he describe any group escapes.
Hurt, R. Douglas. “Planters and Slavery in Little Dixie.” Missouri Historical Review 88 (July 1994): 397-415. [WEB]
Hurt examines the institution of slavery in the Little Dixie counties as an economic institution as opposed to a cultural or social institution. Specifically, he explains how agriculture and the commercial markets were essentially dependent on slave labor. Planters and slaveowners relied on their bondsmen for agricultural labor and domestic work. Booms in certain crops like hemp and tobacco motivated slaveholders to purchase more bondsmen which led the prices to rise as slave labor was viewed as less expensive and more efficient than hiring wage laborers. Hurt argues that the institution of slavery played a role in the development of Missouri’s capitalist economy. Essentially, it was a way of life in Little Dixie from the perspective of slave owners who viewed it as an economic necessity.
There was no mention of stampedes or any group escapes.
Merkel, Benjamin G. “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders, 1840-1860.” Missouri Historical Review, 37 (April 1943): 271-85. [WEB]
In “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders,1840-1860,” Benjamin G. Merkel highlights prominent Underground Railroad agents and groups that were typically involved as well as common routes that ran through the Missouri borderlands. He indicates that specific Underground Railroad lines within the state were elusive, as the operators did not document them for fear of potentially incriminating themselves. Merkel also identifies certain abolitionist institutions, like the Mission Institute in Quincy, which greatly assisted the anti-slavery movement. He describes specific towns like Quincy, Salem, Tabor and Sparta that were “hotspots” for abolitionist activity and how residents of these areas provided aid for freedom seekers. He provides examples of specific efforts made by abolitionists to convince bondsmen to escape, some of which were successful and some of which were not. He also provides specific examples of individual and group escapes, both successful and unsuccessful.
Merkel does not use the word “stampede” or any variant, but he does describe multiple group escapes. He discusses an escape in 1848, in which 9 slaves escaped from Ruel Daggs’s farm in Clark County. The freedom seekers travelled to Iowa, but were located by two pro-slavery Missourians in Salem. There, they were brought before a judge in a Quaker settlement and the Quakers who were involved in Underground Railroad activity helped them escape. Merkel also describes a presumably successful group escape from Palmyra in 1853 in which 11 freedom seekers crossed the river at Quincy in pursuit of freedom in Canada. Merkel explained how after this escape, an anti-abolition organization called the Marion Association had politician Thomas L. Anderson speak in Palmyra about legislative ways to prevent these escapes. Both of these group escapes were covered by the House Divided Project as the 1848 Daggs Farm Escape and the 1853 Palmyra Stampede. Merkel discusses another group escape in 1858, in which one freedom seeker was ushered through Galesburg to Canada. He returned back to Missouri in order to pick up 9 other freedom seekers. A total of 5 or 6 arrived in Galesburg and presumably made it to Canada.
Roberts, Anna K. “Crossing Jordan: The Mississippi River in the Black Experience in Greater St. Louis, 1815–1860.” Missouri Historical Review 113 (Oct. 2018): 22-40. [WEB]
Roberts discusses how for enslaved people in Missouri, crossing the Mississippi River was an important step toward obtaining some degree of freedom and finding a better life. She points out that the river served as a symbolic representation of freedom with religious undertones, alluding to the River Jordan. Although it was represented this way, Roberts indicates that most times this did not ring true, as African Americans who crossed the river into the free state of Illinois still faced discrimination in the form of legal and institutional restrictions as well as prejudice in their informal interactions with white residents. Essentially, it did not matter that legally, Illinois was not a slave state because they still treated African Americans as such. In some cases, bondsmen and women may have had more luck obtaining privileges in Missouri than they would have if they crossed the river into the free state of Illinois. She explains several ways in which abolitionists and free Blacks tried to combat this oppression on both sides of the river, including building illegal schools and churches and through missionaries who came to St. Louis to share their faith-based messages. She also discusses other options for enslaved people such as bringing their cases to the St. Louis courts, like Dred Scott did, and self-purchasing. But, she highlighted how these options were not accessible to all slaves, so crossing the Mississippi river was often the most plausible option.
Roberts never uses the word “stampede” or any variant, but she did describe some group escapes. She mentions a group escape in 1842 in which five enslaved people, a woman and her three children and 16 year old Caroline Quarrlls, escaped on a steamboat in between St. Louis and Alton. She discusses another group escape in May of 1855 in which Mary Meachum, a free Black named Isaac, and 8 or 9 freedom seekers including Esther Shaw and her two kids crossed the Mississippi and were captured. She also describes when Bill Williams, a very experienced Underground Railroad operative, helped deliver three freedom seekers to Illinois in 1847 and briefly mentions how in 1854, a free Black man from Alton helped 15 freedom seekers across the river and to Chicago.
Willoughby, Robert J. “‘I’ll Wade in Missouri Blood’: Daggs v. Frazier: A Case of Missouri Runaway Slaves.” Missouri Historical Review 99 (Jan. 2005): 115-138. [WEB]
Willoughby provides details of the group escape from Ruel Daggs’s farm in Clark County, Missouri that ultimately led to the federal court case of Daggs v. Frazier. He gives detailed accounts of both legal counsels’ cases and cites specific arguments they each made. In addition, he provides context for the hostile political climate in Iowa and Missouri during the time of this case. Specifically, there was debate over the Compromise of 1850 and and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 that made slavery a highly contested issue in each state.
Willoughby does not use the word stampede or any variant, nor does he describe any group escape other than the Daggs Farm Escape. The only other mention of any other case important to the development of the Fugitive Slave Act was the 1842 Prigg v. Com. of Pennsylvania.