This post is the second of two posts on the first newspaper-identified “slave stampede” in American history from Kentucky; see also 1847 Kenton and Boone County Stampedes: Part 1.

DATELINE: AUGUST 20, 1847, NEAR CASSOPOLIS, MI

Early on Friday morning, August 20, freedom seekers Perry Sanford, Reuben Stevens, and members of the Sandford family awoke to a loud knock and an eerily familiar voice. “We all recognized it as the voice of Jack Graves, the master of Sandford and the brother of my master,” Perry Sanford recalled. [1]

Sanford, Stevens, and the Sandfords were among 33 enslaved Kentuckians–men, women, and children–who had liberated themselves in two daring stampedes from Kenton and Boone Counties during the spring of 1847. After reaching southern Michigan, the freedom seekers opted to remain in Cass County, where they lived and worked on the farm of local abolitionists in relative security. Months later, however, Kentucky slaveholders traveled north and raided the farms of Michigan abolitionists, insisting that the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act authorized them to recapture freedom seekers, even in a free state like Michigan, as well as seek damages from Northern abolitionists like Shugart who assisted them. The freedom seekers and Michigan residents thwarted slaveholders’ hopes of reenslaving the freedom seekers, though enslavers finally won nominal damages some four years later. In the process, the two stampedes from Kentucky to Michigan exposed the ineffectiveness of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and prompted disgruntled slaveholders to call for tougher federal fugitive slave legislation as part of the Compromise of 1850.

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

By 1847, Kentucky slaveholders were growing wise to the extensive communities of freedom seekers who chose to settle in southern Michigan. During the winter of 1846-1847, Kentucky slaveholders had dispatched a spy to Michigan. Identifying himself as Carpenter, the man posed as an abolitionist law student in order to gain the trust of local Underground Railroad operatives and identify the location of freedom seekers across southern Michigan. Armed with Carpenter’s information about “the number and exact location of the fugitives,” a group of Kentucky slave catchers traveled to Marshall, Michigan, in January 1847 in an attempt to recapture the Crosswhites, a family of freedom seekers who had escaped from Kentucky years earlier. [2] Local residents in Marshall intervened and rescued the Crosswhites, enraging Kentucky slaveholders. Two months later in March 1847, Kentucky’s legislature decried the “outrages committed upon the rights and citizens of the State of Kentucky… by the citizens of Michigan,” and demanded that Michigan amend its laws “for the purpose of enabling the citizens of Kentucky to reclaim their runaway and fugitive slaves to the State of Michigan.” [3]

Tensions between Kentucky and Michigan were already fraught when Thornton Timberlake, John and Milton Graves, and ten other Kentuckians arrived at Battle Creek, Michigan on August 1, 1847. Intent on recapturing at least some of the 33 freedom seekers, the Kentuckians began going door-to-door posing as washing machine salesmen. But Battle Creek abolitionist Erastus Hussey was not fooled. Within hours of their arrival, the Quaker abolitionist gathered other local residents and confronted the Kentuckians in their hotel. “The people would not allow any of the negroes there to be returned into slavery,” Hussey thundered. Moreover, Hussey warned “that those who contemplated seizing them for that purpose, were endangering themselves by longer remaining in the vicinity.” The Kentuckians took the hint and beat a hasty retreat from Battle Creek, heading south where they regrouped near the Michigan-Indiana border in Bristol, Indiana. However, Hussey feared that the Kentuckians would be back, likely heading for Cass County next; he dispatched letters warning Cass County abolitionists Stephen Bogue and Zachariah Shugart. But due to “the slowness of the mails,” the Kentuckians arrived before his letters. [4]

On the morning of Friday, August 20, the slave catchers fanned out across the farms of Cass County. The Kentuckians had “very accurately drawn maps upon which the houses which sheltered the fugitives were carefully designated,” which likely had been produced by the pretend-law student “Carpenter” months earlier. The Kentuckians planned to split up, capture freedom seekers living on different farms “as nearly simultaneously as possible,” then regroup and head south for Indiana before local residents could react. To carry out their captives back into bondage, the slaveholders brought with them an ominous looking tobacco wagon. [5]

Slave catchers first stopped at Josiah Osborn’s farm, where they surprised and manacled a family of five freedom seekers, “an old man, his wife, two sons and a daughter.” [6] Nearby on Stephen Bogue’s farm, Perry Sanford, Reuben Stevens, and the Sandford fought off Milt and John Graves. Joe Sandford beat them back with “heavy hickory clubs,” but eventually the Graves and the other slave catchers stormed the cabin, capturing Sandford and his family. Perry Sanford and Reuben Stevens managed to slip away, sprinting through a corn field to call for help. The two split up: Reuben Stevens made a beeline for the home of William “Bill” Jones, an outspoken Quaker abolitionist, while Sanford alerted Stephen Bogue. [7]

When slave catchers reached Zachariah Shugart’s farm near Cassopolis, William Casey (formerly Lewis Gardner) “grabbed a three-legged stool and gave them a battle.” Casey struck his “young master” (likely James Scott, the son of enslaver Charles W. Scott) ” a terrible blow” with the stool; Casey and other abolitionists claimed that the younger Scott died of his wounds weeks later. Slave catchers eventually subdued Casey and his daughter Mary, but Casey’s fierce resistance bought time for his wife Elizabeth to crawl out a small window at the back of the cabin and race through a nearby corn field for help. It was likely Elizabeth Casey who first reached Zachariah Shugart’s house and “gave the alarm.” [8]

In all, slave catchers captured between nine to 10 of the 33 freedom seekers. The captives included William Casey (formerly Lewis Gardner) and his daughter Mary; Joe Sandford, his wife Celia (or Cena) Sandford, and their young daughter. The other captives included the family of five seized at Osborn’s farm, which may have been the Hughbanks family.

Crucially, Reuben Stephens, Perry Sanford, and Elizabeth Casey had all managed to evade capture and tipped off local abolitionists Bill Jones, Stephen Bogue, and Zachariach Shugart. Jones, Bogue, and Shugart each rallied local residents to the freedom seekers’ defense. The slave catchers at Osborn’s farm soon found themselves “surrounded by a throng of angry and threatening men, among them some free negroes.” Other slave catching parties encountered similar resistance. The Kentuckians headed south and regrouped at Odell’s Mill, where at daybreak they were met by an even larger group of angry Michiganders armed with “stout club[s].” The Michiganders made clear that the slave catchers “could not proceed further southward, unless they went without the negroes.” The confrontation nearly escalated to violence, but Quakers Josiah Osborn, Stephen Bogue, and Zachariah Shugart insisted that “only peaceable and lawful measures should be employed.” Outnumbered and cut off, the Kentuckians reluctantly agreed to go before a justice of the peace in the county seat at Cassopolis. [9]

Meanwhile, local abolitionists sabotaged the slaveholders’ distinctive-looking tobacco wagon, which they had left back on Osborn’s farm. First, local residents stripped the wagon of its wheels; later, they reportedly pushed the wagon into nearby Birch Lake. The wagon became a part of local Underground Railroad lore nearly a century later in 1936, when swimmers spotted the wagon submerged “under 100 feet of water.” A year later in 1937, a local newspaper reported plans to recover the wagon for display at the Cass County Historical Museum. [10]

Once in Cassopolis, Timberlake, Graves, and company hired a local lawyer, George Turner, who counseled the slave catchers that they had little hope of success. “Although the [1793 Fugitive Slave] law was up on their side,” Turner explained, “it would be almost an absolute impossibility” to return south with the freedom seekers, “even if an order was secured from any court in Cass County.” The Kentuckians ignored Turner’s advice and proceed anyway. While Timberlake, Graves, and company sought out a justice of the peace, local authorities charged all the Kentuckians with kidnapping. Authorities also pressed additional charges against four of the Kentuckians for trespass on Josiah Osborn’s property, and singled out another slave catcher for assault and battery. The Kentuckians had to post $2,600 bail as they waited for a rendition hearing to decide the fate of the nine captives. [11]

Meanwhile, local abolitionists were determined to frustrate the slaveholders’ attempt to use the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Although it was a federal law, the 1793 statute entrusted enforcement largely to state and local officials throughout the North. State and local officials across the North often did not enforce the law as vigorously as slaveholders would have liked. The local judge in Cass County, A.H. Redfield, was absent, so abolitionists applied to a sympathetic judge in neighboring Berrien County, Ebenezer McIlvain, for a writ of habeas corpus. McIlvain agreed to hear the case and traveled to Cassopolis on Monday, August 23. [12]

The Kentuckians quickly realized that they were fighting an uphill battle with the antislavery-leaning McIlvain. “This unprincipled scoundrel declared before he went on the bench, that he intended to set the negroes at liberty,” the slave catchers alleged. Whatever McIlvain may have uttered, he quickly released the freedom seekers on a technicality: the Kentuckians had not brought a certified copy of Kentucky’s laws authorizing slavery. A Covington newspaper decried “this most atrocious piece of abolition villainy,” and denounced southern Michigan as a “vile den of Negro thieves and recreants to every principle of honor and common honesty.” [13] 

 

AFTERMATH

After McIlvain released the nine captives, local abolitionists rushed the freedom seekers to the farm of Ishmael Lee. There, the nine released captives rejoined with a larger group of about 52 freedom seekers; many from the two Kentucky stampedes, and other local Black residents alarmed by the Kentuckians’ raid. Immediately, the group of 52 freedom seekers continued northeast to Schoolcraft, Michigan, where abolitionists Dr. Nathan and Pamela Thomas offered them food. “They soon arrived, took the provisions without alighting, and passed in safety to Canada,” remembered Pamela Thomas. Most of the freedom seekers put down roots in Canada, but not all. Perry Sanford, Lewis Gardner/William Casey, his wife Elizabeth, and their daughter Mary all stayed in Battle Creek, Michigan, where they continued to work for abolitionist farmers. [14]

Most of the freedom seekers were safely in Canada, but the legal fallout from the August 1847 rescue was only beginning. Section 4 of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act authorized enslavers to sue abolitionists who harbored freedom seekers for damages. Graves, Timberlake, and the other enslavers involved in the raid were likely encouraged to do so by the outcome of another penalty case: in late 1848, Kentucky slaveholder Francis Glitner won damages from residents of Marshall, Michigan for their role in rescuing the Crosswhite family nearly two years earlier. [15]

In January 1849, slaveholders Thornton Timberlake, John and Milton Graves, and Charles Scott all filed penalty cases under the 1793 federal Fugitive Slave Act. The trial began in December 1850. Thornton Timberlake sued for $2,000 for 5 individuals, Jonathan, Nancy, Mary, Robert, and Gabriel; Milt Graves sued Stephen Bogue for $600 for Perry Sanford; John Graves sued Bogue for $1,500 for 3 freedom seekers valued; and Charles Scott sued Bogue, Shugart, Jones, David T. Nicholson, and even McIlvain for $900 for Lewis Gardner/William Casey. For their defense counsel, Michigan abolitionists hired Jacob M. Howard, later a US senator who would play a crucial role in drafting the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery. The first case ended in a mistrial in January 1851. [16]

A retrial began in December 1851, but most defendants opted out. The Michigan farmers were still struggling to pay the $2,200 in legal fees incurred during the first trial. Instead of enduring another trial, Ishmael Lee (whose farm the freedom seekers stayed at after their release by McIlvain) and David T. Nicholson agreed to settle with the enslavers out of court: Lee and Nicholson paid the slaveholders’ counsel, Abner Pratt, a total of $1,000, plus $300-500 for legal costs. Cass County abolitionists had started a subscription to pay off their legal fees, though it remains unclear how much of the cost Lee and Nicholson shouldered alone. [17]

As far as slaveholders were concerned, the rescue of the freedom seekers and the long, expensive process to recover damages only confirmed the need for tougher federal fugitive slave legislation. Back in Kentucky, a Covington newspaper denounced the August 1847 rescue as a “most atrocious piece of abolition villainy.” Michigan abolitionists’ defiance of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, the paper argued, made clear that “things have indeed come to a startling condition when such conduct is not only allowed to pass unpunished, but actually receives the sanction of public approval in the North.” [18] In particular, McIlvain’s involvement in the case highlighted what slaveholders viewed as the unreliability of Northern state and local officials. Increasingly, slaveholders believed that Northern officials like McIlvain could not be trusted to honor slaveholders’ property rights. [19]

The August 1847 raid and rescue was among several key cases during the late 1840s that led slaveholders to demand a tougher federal fugitive slave law. As part of the Compromise of 1850, enslavers would ultimately secure a new, more draconian Fugitive Slave Act, to be enforced by federal officials.

 

FURTHER READING

Alfred Mathews’s and Howard Roger’s histories of Cass County provide the most detailed accounts of the August 1847 raid and rescue. [20] Perry Sanford’s 1884 newspaper interview offers a key eyewitness account to the raid. [21]

Historian Carol Mull covers the August 1847 raid in detail in her book, The Underground Railroad in Michigan (2010). [22] David Chardavoyne has provided the most detailed account of the legal penalty cases stemming from the rescue in his article, “Michigan and the Fugitive Slave Acts” (2004). [23]

 

[1] For Perry Sanford’s recollection, see Mary G. Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” Heritage Battle Creek, vol. 9 (Winter 1999), 78-81, [WEB]. Original interview with Perry Sanford from Sunday Morning Call, August 3, 1884.

[2] Alfred Mathews, History of Cass County, Michigan (Chicago: Waterman, Watkins, & Co., 1882), 109-115, [WEB]; Howard S. Rogers, History of Cass County, from 1825 to 1875 (Cassopolis, MI: W.H. Mansfield, 1875), 131-142, [WEB]; David G. Chardavoyne, “Michigan and the Fugitive Slave Acts,” The Court Legacy (The Historical Society for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan) vol. 12, no. 13 (November 2004), 1-11, [WEB].

[3] Quoted in Senate Rep. 143, 30^th Cong, 1^st sess., p. 2.

[4] Mathews, History of Cass County, 109-115, [WEB]; Rogers, History of Cass County, 131-142, [WEB]. According to abolitionist Levi Coffin in Cincinnati, a white Kentucky man sympathetic to the freedom seekers caught wind of slaveholders’ plans and alerted him. Coffin sent a messenger to Young’s Prairie to warn Bogue and Shugart, but he arrived too late. See Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, The Reputed President of the Underground Railroad (Cincinnati, OH: Western Tract Society, 1876), 368, [WEB].

[5] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB]; Mathews, History of Cass County, 109-115, [WEB]; Rogers, History of Cass County, 131-142, [WEB]; Cass County (MI) Advocate, quoted in Covington (KY) Licking Valley Register, October 15, 1847.

[6] Mathews, History of Cass County, 109-115, [WEB]; Rogers, History of Cass County, 131-142, [WEB].

[7] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB].

[8] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB]; Mathews, History of Cass County, 109-115, [WEB]; Rogers, History of Cass County, 131-142, [WEB]; Coffin, Reminiscences, 370, [WEB]; see Lewis Gardner/William Casey’s obituary, “Slavery Days Recalled,” Detroit (MI) Free Press, January 24, 1893.

[9] Mathews, History of Cass County, 109-115, [WEB]; Rogers, History of Cass County, 131-142, [WEB].

[10] Slaveholders reported the damage done to their wagon in Covington (KY) Licking Valley Register, September 17, 1847. On efforts to recover the wagon, see Cassopolis,” Unionville (MI) Crescent, March 5, 1937.

[11] Mathews, History of Cass County, 109-115, [WEB]; Rogers, History of Cass County, 131-142, [WEB].

[12] Mathews, History of Cass County, 109-115, [WEB]; Rogers, History of Cass County, 131-142, [WEB]; Chardavoyne, “Michigan and the Fugitive Slave Acts,” 1-11, [WEB].

[13] “Infamous!,” Covington (KY) Licking Valley Register, September 3, 1847; Covington (KY) Licking Valley Register, September 17, 1847.

[14] Carol Mull, The Underground Railroad in Michigan (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 113.

[15] Chardavoyne, “Michigan and the Fugitive Slave Acts,” 8, [WEB].

[16] Chardavoyne, “Michigan and the Fugitive Slave Acts,” 8-9, [WEB]. For the case files, see Thornton Timberlake v. Josiah Osborn, National Archives Identifier: 12563235; Thornton Timberlake v. Josiah Osborn, et al. National Archives Identifier: 12562895; Milton W. Graves v. Stephen Bogue, National Archives Identifier: 12561278; John L. Graves v. Stephen Bogue, National Archives Identifier: 12563250; Charles Scott v. Zachariah Shugart, Stephen Bogue, David T. Nicholson, William Jones, and Ebenezer McIlvain, National Archives Identifier: 12563189; John L. Graves v. Stephen Bogue, William Jones, and Ebenezer McIlvain, National Archives Identifier: 12562736.

[17] Chardavoyne, “Michigan and the Fugitive Slave Acts,” 9-11, [WEB].

[18] “Infamous!,” Covington (KY) Licking Valley Register, September 3, 1847.

[19] On criticisms of McIlvain, see Covington (KY) Licking Valley Register, September 17, 1847.

[20] Mathews, History of Cass County, 109-115, [WEB]; Rogers, History of Cass County, 131-142, [WEB].

[21] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB].

[22] Mull, The Underground Railroad in Michigan, 111-113.

[23] Chardavoyne, “Michigan and the Fugitive Slave Acts,” 1-11, [WEB].

This post is the first of two posts on the first newspaper-identified “slave stampede” in American history from Kentucky; see also 1847 Kenton and Boone County Stampedes: Part 2.

DATELINE: APRIL 24, 1847, KENTON COUNTY, KY

Sometime in May 1847, Michigan farmer Zachariah Shugart opened his account book and added several new names to a list of “Runaway Negroes” whom he had assisted over years of Underground Railroad activism. Shugart scrawled the names of Kentucky freedom seekers “L Gardner” “B Gardner” and their “1 ch[ild]”: Lewis and Betsy Gardner, and their young daughter Mary. Shugart also recorded five members of the “Stephenson” or Stevens family: Reuben, Nelson, Nancy, and likely at least two of her children, Peter and Anny. [1]

Shugart’s account book documented just part of two bold mass escapes from slavery during the spring of 1847. Multiple families–33 enslaved men, women, and children in all–liberated themselves from two northern Kentucky counties in under a month. In response, newspaper editors across the river in Cincinnati coined a new term to describe the growing trend of large, group escapes from slavery: the “slave stampede.” [2]

 

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

The April 1847 stampede marked the first known application of the term “stampede” to describe group escapes from enslavement. Within days of the first group escape on April 24, at least two Cincinnati newspapers reported it under the headline: “Grand Stampede.” [3] The term quickly captivated public attention. Newspapers across the country reprinted the headline “Grand Stampede” and its brief description of the large group escape. [4]

In 1847, the term “stampede” had only recently entered Americans’ vocabulary. Reports on the ongoing US-Mexican War (1846-1848) and expansion into the southwest introduced the term “stampede” to American readers; both to describe Mexican troops “stampeding” from the battlefield and droves of cattle “stampeding” across the western plains. It was no coincidence that the first reports of “slave stampedes” in 1847 ran alongside dispatches from the frontlines of the Mexican War. [5]

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

Families from six different plantations joined the initial mass escape from Kenton County on Saturday, April 24. From slaveholder Thornton Timberlake’s plantation came the Hughbanks family: 45-year-old Jonathan, 33-year-old Nancy, 16-year-old Mary, and Robert (either 14 or 15 years old). Twenty-six year old Lewis (also known as William) and 22-year-old Betsy (also known as Elizabeth) Gardner escaped from different slaveholders, and brought their young daughter Mary too. Once free, the Gardner family adopted the surname Casey. Nancy Stevens (also written as Stephens and Stephenson) escaped from Thomas Lindsay’s plantation, taking two of her children, Peter who was seven or eight years old, and Anny who was three or four. The oldest freedom seeker was Rachel, in her late 60s, who escaped from slaveholder Alexander P. Sandford. Two days on April 26, the six affected slaveholders jointly advertised a $3,125 reward for the freedom seekers’ recapture. [6]

Within weeks, the 22 freedom seekers successfully reached Cass County, Michigan. Few specifics about their journey survive, but all signs suggest that the freedom seekers traveled a familiar Underground Railroad route (described below) that veered northwest through central Indiana all the way to southern Michigan. Within a few weeks, the freedom seekers had reached the end of that  route, an abolitionist enclave in Cass County, Michigan. Several of the freedom seekers found work and boarding on the farm of Quaker abolitionist Zachariah Shugart, located about three miles outside Cassopolis. In his account book, Shugart recorded the arrival of “L. Gardner” and “B Gardner” (Lewis and Betsy Gardner/Casey), a man named “Wesley,” as well as the Stevens family (recorded as “Stephenson”). [7]

Back in Boone County, Kentucky (next to Kenton County), enslaved man Perry Sanford knew many of the freedom seekers who had escaped in the April 24 stampede. But as Sanford later told a journalist, their successful escape was not what inspired him to head north; rather, it was his slaveholder’s panicked reaction that prompted a second group escape from Kenton County. “Their [April 24] escape alarmed the slave owners and they began to sell off their slaves to the Mississippi cotton planters,” Sanford recounted. Sanford’s enslaver, Milt Graves, was among the panic-stricken slaveholders. Several weeks after the initial stampede, Graves’s son, “a talkative youngster, told me that his father had sold us into Mississippi.” Decades later, Sanford still remembered the shock and dread he felt at hearing the news. “I was struck with dismay. The horror of all horrors to the slave was the Mississippi cotton field. It was a living hell.” [8]

Later that day while working in the field, Sanford quietly communicated “the startling information I had received to the other slaves.” When the overseer left for a few minutes, Sanford and other enslaved Kentuckians huddled together and “resolved on an escape.” Sanford tallied a total of 12 individuals planning to join the escape. Much like the first group of 22 freedom seekers, this second group consisted of men, women, and children: in addition to Perry Sanford, there was the Merriman family, William, Samuel, Isabella, and Hannah; James and Dorcas Oglesby; David (Dave) Walker and his mother, Susan Reynolds; and two other men, Abraham Washington and Tom Harris. One of the freedom seekers managed to secure a pass and traveled to Covington, where they made arrangements with an unidentified white man to help the group navigate the river-crossing to Cincinnati. [9]

Reaching Covington took longer than expected. Although the freedom seekers only had to cover 12 miles from their plantation to the riverside town of Covington, Sanford explained, “we had to travel across the fields in order to avoid meeting teams and travelers and to pass the tollgates.” The group did not reach Covington until 4 am. By then, the white man who had agreed to ferry them across the river had tired of waiting and gone home. “This was a great disappointment to us,” Sanford recalled, “but we started down the bank of the Ohio River and almost providentially found a boat, or as they are called there, a skiff.” Sanford and 10 others crowded into the skiff. “The sides came to within an inch of the water,” Sanford detailed. “How we ever got across I don’t know. But it was life or death, as we made the attempt and reached Cincinnati in safety.” All 11 freedom seekers who attempted the river crossing made it safely across––one man, Henry Buckner, was reportedly drunk and failed to arrive in time. Slaveholders punished Buckner for his attempt to flee enslavement, though he escaped less than two years later. [10]

In Cincinnati, Sanford and the 10 other freedom seekers linked up with the city’s Underground Railroad network. “As we landed, we saw a colored and a white man standing together. They exclaimed: ‘There comes some runaway slaves.’” The freedom seekers’ dread soon turned to relief; they had stumbled into Cincinnati’s network of Underground Railroad activists. The two Underground Railroad operatives divided the group into pairs, and “we were distributed around and secreted in the cellars of business blocks,” Sanford recalled. [11] The cadre of Underground Railroad operatives who sheltered Sanford’s group may well have included Quaker abolitionists Levi and Catharine Coffin, who had just relocated to Cincinnati weeks earlier in April 1847. [12]

After laying low for a week in Cincinnati, abolitionists guided Sanford and the other ten freedom seekers northward along a well-established Underground Railroad route that veered northwest through central Indiana all the way to southern Michigan. Leaving Cincinnati, the freedom seekers headed to Hamilton, Ohio, and then northwest to Jonesboro, Indiana. Near Jonesboro, the freedom seekers met up with Quaker abolitionist bothers George and John Shugart. “We only traveled nights, and in covered wagons,” Sanford detailed, “and would be secreted day times in some Quaker’s barn or in the woods.” Along the way, Quaker abolitionists provided the freedom seekers with new clothes. [13]

Sanford did not mention any other stops by name until they neared Cassopolis, Michigan, but his 1884 interview aligns closely with what Quaker abolitionists later told historian Wilbur Siebert about a well-traveled Underground Railroad route from Cincinnati to southern Michigan. Assuming Sanford’s group followed the familiar route, they likely continued north from Jonesboro to North Manchester, Indiana, where they may have sought refuge with abolitionist Morris Place. Then, they likely proceeded north to Goshen, Indiana, where a Dr. Matchett assisted freedom seekers. [14]

 

AFTERMATH

After about a month of travel, the freedom seekers reached Young’s Prairie, about three miles outside Cassopolis, Michigan. There, abolitionists Stephen Bogue and Zachariah Shugart (brother of  George and John Shugart in Jonesboro, Indiana) helped place the freedom seekers with local farmers. Perry Sanford and Reuben Stevens went to work for Stephen Bogue, sharing a cabin on his farm. [15]

In two stampedes occurring just weeks apart, a total of 33 men, women, and children had liberated themselves from two Kentucky counties. However, their freedom was far from secure. Just months later, Kentucky slaveholders arrived in southern Michigan in hopes of recapturing the freedom seekers.

 

FURTHER READING

Perry Sanford’s impromptu 1884 newspaper interview provides the most detailed eyewitness account from either of the two stampedes. [16]

Historian Carol Mull briefly addresses both escapes in her book, The Underground Railroad in Michigan (2010), but does not use the term “stampede” to describe either escape. Mull notes how the first group of 22 freedom seekers settled near Young’s Prairie in Cass County, Michigan, while also detailing the second group of freedom seekers using Perry Sanford’s recollection. [17]

 

[1] Zachariah Shugart Account Book, p. 101, Zachariah T. Shugart Papers, Huntington Library, [WEB].

[2] “Grand Stampede,” Cincinnati (OH) Commercial Tribune, April 28, 1847.

[3] “Grand Stampede,” Cincinnati (OH) Commercial Tribune, April 28, 1847; A Danville, Vermont newspaper reported an identical article, but attributed it to the Cincinnati Atlas. See “Grand Stampede,” Danville (VT) North Star, May 17, 1847. We have been unable to locate the original issue of the Atlas; it remains unclear which Cincinnati paper first coined the term.

[4] “Grand Stampede,”New York (NY) Evening Post, May 3, 1847; Providence (RI) Republican Herald, May 4, 1847; “Grand Stampede,” Hallowell (ME) Cultivator and Hallowell Gazette, May 15, 1847; “Grand Stampede,” Danville (VT) North Star, May 17, 1847; “Grand Stampede,” Prairieville (WI) American Freeman, June 9, 1847

[5] For more on the origins of the “stampede” terminology, see this post.

[6] “$3,125 Reward,” at “What’s In a Name–Johnson Family,” Amherstburg Freedom Museum, [WEB]. See Perry Sanford’s recollection for the name of Gardner’s/Casey’s daughter, Mary. Mary G. Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” Heritage Battle Creek, vol. 9 (Winter 1999), 78-81, [WEB]. Original interview with Perry Sanford from Sunday Morning Call, August 3, 1884. For more on the Gardner/Casey family, see Lewis Gardner/William Casey’s obituary, “Slavery Days Recalled,” Detroit (MI) Free Press, January 24, 1893.

[7] Zachariah Shugart Account Book, p. 101, Zachariah T. Shugart Papers, Huntington Library, [WEB]; Timberlake later named five freedom seekers, Jonathan, Nancy, Mary, Robert, and Gabriel, whom he accused Michigan abolitionists of harboring. See Thornton Timberlake v. Josiah Osborn, et al., January 10, 1849, National Archives Identifier: 12562895.

[8] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB]; Milton W. Graves v. Stephen Bogue, January 10, 1849, National Archives Identifier: 12561278.

[9] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB]. See African Americans of the Kentucky Borderlands database, https://omekas.bcplhistory.org/s/borderlands/item/15621.

[10] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB].

[11] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB].

[12] Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, The Reputed President of the Underground Railroad (Cincinnati, OH: Western Tract Society, 1876), 274, 297, [WEB].

[13] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB].

[14] John Rattiff to Wilbur H. Siebert, March 22, 1896, [WEB]; Charles W. Osborn to Wilbur H. Siebert, February 11, 1896, [WEB]; Charles W. Osborn to Wilbur H. Siebert, March 4, 1896, [WEB], all in Wilbur H. Siebert Papers, Ohio History Connection.

[15] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB]; Zachariah Shugart Account Book, p. 101, Shugart Papers, Huntington Library, [WEB].

[16] Butler and Martin L. Ashley (eds.), “Out of Bondage,” 78-81, [WEB].

[17] Carol Mull, The Underground Railroad in Michigan (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 109-113. Mull states that the first group of freedom seekers escaped “in late March.” She likely based this off of Sanford’s account; Sanford recalls escaping on the Monday after Easter (which would have been April 5, 1847). However, the newspaper reports, the slaveholders’ runaway ad, and court documents (cited above) all clearly concur that the first escape occurred on April 24, 1847. Moreover, Sanford’s recollection makes clear that it was slaveholders’ panic at the first escape which prompted the second group escape. In all likelihood, Sanford confused the exact time of the second escape.

This post is the third of three posts on the Camp Nelson Stampede:  see also Initial Stampede (Part 1) and Enslaved Women (Part 2)

DATELINE: MARCH 1865, GARRARD COUNTY, KY

“I told my master that I wanted to go to Camp Nelson.” With those words, Martha Cooley boldly challenged her slaveholder’s authority in early March 1865. Months earlier, her husband Simon had gone to Camp Nelson and enlisted in the US army, only to be killed in action shortly thereafter. Newly widowed, Cooley hoped to gather her four children and journey to Camp Nelson. But slaveholder John Nave would have none of it. “He said, ‘I will give you Camp’ and immediately took a large hickory stick with which he commenced beating me.” After Nave’s successive beatings broke her left arm, Cooley “watched my chance and ran away.” She reached Camp Nelson in mid-March, but only after making the difficult decision “to leave my children behind with my master.” Cooley told US army officials that she was “very anxious to get my children.” [1]

Following the US army’s controversial November 1864 expulsion of enslaved women and children, Black families pressured Congress to act. In March 1865, lawmakers finally did, declaring free the family members of Black US soldiers. The new law emboldened Black women like Martha Cooley to head for Camp Nelson, even as Kentucky slaveholders tried everything to stop them. The influx of freedom seekers prompted US army officials to construct the Refugees Home, a community of 100 cottages to house freedpeople. But US victory in 1865 underscored Black Kentuckians’ tenuous foothold in freedom. Army officials wanted to demobilize the army and close wartime contraband camps like Camp Nelson’s Refugee Home. Freedpeople resisted, and in a remarkable turn of events, secured title to the land and put down permanent roots, founding the community of Ariel (later renamed Hall). At Camp Nelson, freedpeople transformed a wartime stampede into a permanent community which outlasted the war. 

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

Of the 400 women and children expelled from camp, around 250 returned to Camp Nelson. On December 2, 1864, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered army officials to provide permanent quarters for the refugees. [2] Stanton hoped to prevent further suffering during the winter months, but the haphazard accommodations provided by the army still remained far from ideal––especially for women and children still recovering from exposure during the expulsion. Throughout January and February 1865, as many as 102 of the 250 returning refugees perished.  Among the deceased were Pvt. Joseph Miller, whose heartrending testimony helped spur Congressional action, and his entire family. [3]

US officials worried that the overcrowding in Camp Nelson would only get worse after March 1865, when Congress passed a law freeing the enslaved family members of Black US soldiers. US general John Palmer decided to designate Camp Nelson “a general rendezvous for all these people in Ky.” [4] Palmer tapped quartermaster Theron E. Hall to supervise the construction of housing for the expected influx of Black women and children: a village of 100 cabins called the Refugees Home. Led by Hall and his assistant superintendent, freedom seeker and preacher Gabriel Burdett, Black refugees performed much of the physical labor. The resulting cottages measured 32 by 16 feet, divided into two 16 by 16 foot rooms. Each room was “designed to accommodate 10 persons, possibly 12,” meaning that every cottage could house at least 20-24 people. Work proceeded fast. “These cottages are now being built by the government at the rate of three per day,” reported one observer in late April 1865, “thus far making shelter for 60 newcomers daily.” [5]

Even so, construction of the Refugees Home struggled to keep pace with the influx of freedom seekers; as word of Congress’s new law spread across Kentucky, more and more Black women felt emboldened to head for Camp Nelson. An enslaved woman named Lucinda learned of the new congressional law when she received a letter dictated by her husband, a Black soldier at Camp Nelson, informing her “that she was free” and advising her to either demand wages from her slaveholder or else leave and seek work elsewhere. Two weeks later, Lucinda’s former slaveholder William Pratt awoke to find “the kitchen in the morning, swept, garnished, & Empty”—Lucinda and her daughter had vanished during the night, presumably bound for Camp Nelson. [6]

Reaching Camp Nelson remained as perilous as ever, with slaveholders and local authorities continuing to obstruct their path. Married couple William and Marilda Jones learned about the new congressional law and resolved to head to Camp Nelson together. “Desiring to enlist and thus free my wife,” William later explained, “I ran away from my master in company with my wife…. Our clothes were packed up and some money we had saved from our earnings we carried with us.” However, local constables in Lexington seized the couple to prevent them from “going to Camp Nelson,” instead returning them to their slaveholder and pocketing the Jones’s hard-earned savings. Undeterred, Willian and Marilda escaped again and reached Camp Nelson towards the end of March. [7]

Also in March, Frances Johnson gathered her children and headed for Camp Nelson, only to cross paths with Theophilus Bracey, her slaveholder’s son-in-law. Bracey drew a pistol and “told me that if I did not go back with him he would shoot me.” Bracey held Johnson’s seven-year-old daughter “and kept her as an Hostage” to dissuade Johnson from trying to escape again. Early the next morning, Johnson made the difficult decision to slip away by herself. “I found I could not get away from Braceys with my children, and determined to get away myself hoping by this means to obtain possession of them afterwards.” Once at Camp Nelson, Johnson pleaded with US officials to help her secure her children. “I am anxious to have them but I am afraid to go near them,” Johnson told US army officials, “knowing that Bracey would not let me have them and fearing lest he would carry out his threat to shoot me.” [8]

Despite slaveholders’ best efforts to deter them, Black women and children continued to head to Camp Nelson in large numbers throughout the spring of 1865. A representative of the American Missionary Association calculated that as of April 1, there were 1,266 people living in the Refugees Home, “nearly all of them women and children.” Over the ensuing 11 days, 354 more refugees arrived. By the end of April, the AMA official had lost count—he simply reported that “there cannot be less than 2000” people residing in the Refugees Home.  “They came to the city of refuge hopeful and as a general thing earnest for improvement — for religious culture, for mental training.” [9]

 

AFTERMATH

The end of the war thrust Camp Nelson’s community of freedpeople into yet more uncertainty. With US victory assured, the federal government ceased recruiting Black soldiers in late April 1865. [10]  But slavery remained legal in Kentucky until the ratification of the 13^th Amendment in December 1865; the persistence of legal bondage rendered it dangerous for freedpeople to travel outside Camp Nelson. Moreover, Kentucky whites’ antipathy towards Black soldiers and their families had only deepened in the wake of US victory. In April 1865, a Kentucky judge declared unconstitutional Congress’s March 1865 law freeing the family members of Black US soldiers. US general John Palmer swept aside the judge’s ruling, but it underscored white Kentuckians’ continued resistance to emancipation. [11] Months later in June 1865, the Kentucky legislature demanded that the US army to remove all Black soldiers from the state. “Their presence is a source of great irritation to their former owners and the citizens generally,” legislators thundered. [12]

Freedpeople across Kentucky understood that their freedom—and their physical safety—hinged on the US military’s continued presence. In June 1865, a delegation of Black Kentuckians told President Andrew Johnson that if he “should give up the State to the control of her civil authorities there is not one of these [Black] Soldiers who will Not Suffer all the grinding oppression of her most inhuman[e] laws if not in their own persons yet in the persons of their wives their children their mothers.” [13] Superintendent Theron Hall echoed freedpeople’s warning. “Not a day passes during which I am not entreated by some poor defenceless wife or child to interfere for their protection against the furry of their master,” Hall explained from Camp Nelson in June. “I beg you to examine this subject carefully ere you decide to discontinue this ‘Home,’ this ‘City of refuge’ to which they can flee and be safe.” [14]

The dangers facing freedpeople were real and many, but senior federal policymakers remained determined to close Camp Nelson. The war had ended, and federal officials feared that freedpeople would become dependent on federal resources indefinitely. “My positive instructions from Washington are ‘to break up the Refugee Home at Camp Nelson at the earliest possible day consistent with humanity,’” explained Maj. Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, the regional commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau. [15] “Everything to break up the camp and not entail suffering,” Fisk instructed his subordinates. “There will be some suffering [but] do the best we can.” [16] Throughout the summer and fall of 1865, Fisk and Freedmen’s Bureau agents tried to prod freedpeople to leave Camp Nelson and establish their own homes, where they could farm and support themselves. [17]

So long as slavery remained legal in Kentucky, however, slaveholders and state officials refused to recognize the freedom of the Black soldiers and their families who called Camp Nelson home. Throughout the fall of 1865, Kentucky lawmakers adopted a rash of new slave codes restricting African Americans’ movement. Kentucky lawmakers fined anyone caught transporting enslaved people without their owners’ consent, including government wagons transporting freedpeople out of Camp Nelson. Legislators also passed a new law penalizing anyone who hired enslaved people, severely limiting the opportunities for freedpeople to find work outside Camp Nelson. [18]

Despite the Freedmen’s Bureau’s efforts to push them out, freedpeople stayed put. The federal government returned ownership of the land on which Camp Nelson sat to its prewar owner, a white Unionist named Joseph Moss. In a surprising turn, Moss indicated that he was willing to sell the land to freedpeople. But Moss’s irate white neighbors would have none of it; they menaced freedpeople with violence and strong-armed Moss into backing out of the original deal. Instead, Moss sold 130 acres of Camp Nelson land to John Fee, a white minister. Fee and his wife Matilda sold lots to Black veterans and refugees. [19]

Freedpeople rechristened their community Ariel (later changed to Hall). The community offered religious community and education, but Kentucky whites’ continued hostility prompted some residents to leave. In 1877, Gabriel Burdett, a freedom seeker and formerly the assistant superintendent of the Refugees Home, led a number of residents westward, where they resettled in Nicodemus, Kansas. Still other families remained at Ariel. By 1895, a Louisville paper reported that “there is now upon the site of the camp a negro village of some three hundred souls…It is a rather thrifty village, and has one of the best private schools utilized for negroes in Kentucky.” Descendants of Black U.S. soldiers and the freedom seekers continue to live at Ariel (Hall) to this day. [20]

 

FURTHER READING

The community of freedpeople at Camp Nelson has been richly documented in the records of the US army, the Freedmen’s Bureau, as well as various humanitarian and religious organizations. A good starting place is Richard Sears’s Camp Nelson, Kentucky (2002), an edited collection of primary sources covering the camp’s existence. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation series 1 (The Destruction of Slavery) and series 2 (The Black Military Experience), also features primary sources related to the community of freedpeople at Camp Nelson. [21]

Amy Taylor’s Embattled Freedom (2018) explores the Freedmen’s Bureau’s efforts to close the Refugees Home and freedpeople’s determination to stay. [22]

 

NOTES

[1] Affidavit of Martha Cooley, March 24, 1865, in Richard D. Sears, Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 186-187.

[2] Burbridge to Fry, November 27, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 137; Townsend to Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army, December 2, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 146.

[3] Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 203; Affidavit of Albert A. Livermore (sexton at Camp Nelson), June 26, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 220-221.

[4] T.E. Hall to M.E. Strieby, March 24, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 184-185.

[5] E. Davis to Executive Committee of the American Missionary Association, April 28, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 196-197; Theron Hall to Oliver Otis Howard, June 22, 1865, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ser. 2 (The Black Military Experience), vol. 2, 717-718; Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 203-204.

[6] William Pratt diary, April 2, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 192-193.

[7] Affidavit of William Jones, March 29, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 192.

[8] Affidavit of Frances Johnson, Sears, Camp Nelson,188-190.

[9] E. Davis to Executive Committee of the American Missionary Association, April 28, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 196-197.

[10] James B. Fry to Lorenzo Thomas, April 29, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 198.

[11] Freedom ser. 1 (The Destruction of Slavery), vol. 1, 617-619.

[12] Resolution of the General Assembly of Kentucky, June 3, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 209.

[13] Freedom ser. 1 (The Destruction of Slavery), vol. 1, 624-626.

[14] T.E. Hall to Oliver Otis Howard, June 22, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 219-220.

[15] Fisk to John G. Fee, August 4, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 236.

[16] Fisk to D.C. Jaquess, August 15, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 239-240.

[17] Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 222-223.

[18] Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 224.

[19] Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 221-230, 237-238.

[20] On Ariel / Hall, see https://www.nps.gov/cane/community-of-ariel-hall-and-fee-memorial-church.htm.

[21] Sears, Camp Nelson; Freedom ser. 1 (The Destruction of Slavery), and ser. 2 (The Black Military Experience.

[22] Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 221-230, 237-238.

This post is the second of three posts on the Camp Nelson Stampede:  see also Initial Stampede (Part 1) and Freedom and Community (Part 3)

DATELINE: FALL 1864, WOODFORD COUNTY, KY

For Patsey Leach, an enslaved woman in Woodford County, Kentucky, the worst began after her husband Julius went to Camp Nelson to enlist. “From that time,” Leach testified, slaveholder Warren Wiley “treated me more cruelly than ever whipping me frequently… saying my husband had gone into the army to fight against white folks and he my master would let me know that I was foolish to let my husband go.” Wiley vowed to “’take it out of my back,’ he would “Kill me by picemeal’ [sic].” [1] 

By June 1864, the initial stampede to Camp Nelson had forced federal officials to open the ranks to all enslaved men in Kentucky, regardless of their slaveholders’ approval. However, the reworked federal policy still did not clarify the status of enslaved women like Patsey Leach. Undeterred, Leach and countless other enslaved women continued to head to Camp Nelson, where they sought refuge and an opportunity to reunite their families. Braving threats of violence from their slaveholders and all manner of dissuasion from US military officials, enslaved women pressured the US military and lawmakers back in Washington to expand federal policy to provide for the families of Black recruits. Enslaved women’s persistent efforts to reunite their families at Camp Nelson directly inspired a new federal law adopted in March 1865, which explicitly freed the wives and children of Black US soldiers.

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

On June 20, 1864, US general Stephen Burbridge confessed that he was not sure about the status of enslaved women and children who were crowding into Camp Nelson alongside their husbands and fathers. Burbridge decided to wait until Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, the army’s top recruiter of African American troops, arrived. In the meantime, Burbridge made clear that “women and children cannot be left to starve” and instructed his subordinates to “establish a contraband camp at Camp Nelson.” [2]

When Thomas arrived at Camp Nelson in July 1864, he decided to backtrack. Thomas based his decision on Kentucky’s status as a loyal slave state, as well as his own assumptions that enslaved women and children would be nothing but a drain on army resources. Matters would be different, Thomas explained, in Confederate states where the Emancipation Proclamation applied and all enslaved people, male and female, were free upon reaching US lines. But in a loyal state like Kentucky, Thomas explained, “I conceive I have only to do with those who can be put into the army.” Thomas believed that he lacked the authority to liberate enslaved women and children, but he also feared that women and children would deplete army resources. “It will not answer to take this class of slaves,” Thomas wrote, “as employment could not be obtained for them, and they would only be an expense to the Government.” If enslaved women remained at home, Thomas calculated, their slaveholders, rather than the army, would be responsible for feeding them. Moreover, they would be on hand to help harvest grain that would be essential to feeding Kentuckians and the Union army. Thomas insisted that he was dutifully following orders; if President Lincoln gave him the authority him to liberate women and children, Thomas declared himself “ready to obey his mandate.” From the perspective of Black recruits and their family members, however, Thomas’s policy seemed callous and inhumane. [3]

Thomas’s General Orders No. 24, issued on July 6, 1864, spelled out the US army’s new policy in Kentucky of discouraging enslaved women from coming to military outposts, while also threatening to return any women and children already behind army lines. “None but able-bodied men will be received,” Thomas declared. Women and children “will be encouraged to remain at their respective homes, where, under the State laws, their masters are bound to take care of them.” But Thomas went a step further. Women “who may have been received at Camp Nelson will be sent to their homes,” where they would be “required to assist in securing the crops, now suffering in many cases for the want of labor.” [4] 

Some US officers in Kentucky protested that Thomas’s orders violated federal law. It was one thing to discourage enslaved women and children from coming, but it was another to actively return women and children who had already entered Camp Nelson. In that respect, Thomas’s General Orders No. 24 seemed like a clear violation of Congress’s revised Articles of War adopted in March 1862, which forbade Union military personnel from returning freedom seekers to bondage, on pain of dismissal from the service. At Paducah in western Kentucky, Col. H.W. Barry refused to obey Thomas’s order. “I cannot return to Slavery, the wives and Children of men, whome… fought so gallantly,” Barry declared. Thomas arrested the good colonel for defying his orders, though War Department officials back in Washington eventually sided with Barry and the enslaved women. At least in western Kentucky, US officials would not turn enslaved women and children out of army lines. [5]

No such protests came from Camp Nelson’s new commandant, Brig. Gen. Speed Smith Fry, a native Kentuckian who had already reached a general understanding with Thomas about the planned expulsion. The men agreed that they would select a date at which US forces would place all enslaved women and children outside the lines, furnishing them with just enough food to reach their slaveholders’ homes. Thomas even suggested that the US army give slaveholders advance notice of the expulsion so that they would be on hand to reclaim freedom seeking women and children. [6]

Impatient slaveholders were unwilling to wait for an official expulsion and showed up at Camp Nelson daily, using a combination of promises and threats to try to coerce freedom seekers back into slavery. “Their old owners came in carriages and on horseback every day to allure them by all kinds of promises and threats,” reported Sanitary Commission superintendent Thomas Butler. Sometimes slaveholders brought the wives of enslaved men along to camp, “and through them they attempt to bring back the servant and husband to slavery.” When such threats failed, slaveholders tried to sneak past camp guards and kidnap men and women back into slavery. [7]

Then suddenly and without warning, on Wednesday morning, November 23, 1864, enslaved women and children awoke to the sound of US soldiers gruffly shouting at them to leave camp. Within minutes, 400 enslaved women and children piled into six to eight large wagons and ominously trundled out of camp, to where they were not sure. [8]

To make matters worse, the morning was “bitter cold,” and “the wind was blowing hard,” recalled Joseph Miller of the 124^th U.S. Colored Infantry. “Having had to leave much of our clothing when we left our master,” Miller explained, his wife Isabella and their four children were ”poorly clad” for such frigid temperatures–which hovered around 16 degrees Fahrenheit that morning. Miller was “certain that it would kill my sick child to take him out in the cold.” The soldier pleaded with one of the soldiers carrying out the expulsion. “I told him that my wife and children had no place to go and I told him that I was a soldier of the United States.” It “would be the death of my boy” to force him out into the biting cold without shelter. The guard was unmoved, however, and threatened to shoot Miller’s wife Isabella and their four children on the spot if they did not climb into an army wagon. [9]

Later that night, Miller caught up his family, taking shelter with other refugees in a ramshackle old meeting house near Nicholasville, six miles north of Camp Nelson. “The building was very cold having only one fire,” Miller explained. “My wife and children could not get near the fire, because of the number of colored people huddled together.” When Miller found Isabella, she and their children were “shivering with cold and famished with hunger.” His son had not survived the frigid cold. “My boy was dead,” Miller testified. “I Know he was Killed by exposure to the inclement weather.” The grieving father returned the next morning, where he “dug a grave myself and buried my own child.” [10]

 

AFTERMATH

The November 23 expulsion caused untold human suffering, but it also proved to be a critical turning point for the US army’s policy towards enslaved women and children in Kentucky. In the days that followed, Miller and other Black soldiers turned to sympathetic US officers in Camp Nelson to help share their harrowing ordeal with the public. Grief-stricken husbands and fathers dictated sworn affidavits before assistant quartermaster Capt. E.B.W. Restieaux. [11]

Another sympathetic quartermaster, Capt. Theron E. Hall, recognized that the tragedy could help rally public support behind the Black women and children, and perhaps even push Congress to take action to ensure that nothing of the sort ever happened again. “The slave Oligarchy,” Hall wrote, “put into my hands the most potent weapon I could use.” Hall wasted no time circulating the Black soldiers’ affidavits to major Northern newspapers and antislavery politicians. Almost overnight, the Camp Nelson expulsion became front-page news. “Cruel Treatment of the Wives and Children of U.S. Colored Soldiers,” read the headline of the New York Tribune on November 28. The paper’s gripping account of “a system of deliberate cruelty” shocked Northern readers. [12]

Official action soon followed. On November 27, General Burbridge directed General Fry to “not expell [sic] any Negro women or children from Camp Nelson.” Instead, Fry should “allow back all who have been turned out” and “if necessary erect buildings for them.” Several days later on December 2, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered that the quartermaster’s department construct permanent buildings to house Black women and children at Camp Nelson. “There will be much suffering among them this winter unless shelters are built and rations issued to them.” [13] Stanton’s order, writes historian Amy Murrell Taylor, “marked a significant blow to slavery in Kentucky, as it now opened the doors to any enslaved man, woman, or child wanting to enter the camp.” [14]

The expulsion also prodded Congressional lawmakers to action. Ohio senator Benjamin Wade read Joseph Miller’s affidavit into the senate record. Wade had visited Camp Nelson months earlier during the summer of 1864. Now on the Senate floor in January 1865, Wade roared that the expulsion had not only been inhumane, but it was against the US military’s interests to turn out Black women and children; doing so would discourage other enslaved Kentuckians from enlisting. “Colored men will not enlist while these things are allowed,” Wade argued. “They have the same feelings toward their wives and children that white men have… and where is the white man who would enlist in the Army of the United States and leave his wife and children subject tot the taunts, the insults, and the ignominy of a master.” [15]

The debate in Congress quickly crystallized around a bill that would free the wives and children of Black soldiers upon their enlistment. Congress approved the legislation on March 3, 1865. One week later on March 10, Stanton issued General Orders No. 10, declaring that for the purposes of enforcing the new law, the army would recognize marriages between enslaved people, even if Kentucky law did not. [16]

Back at Camp Nelson, Black families weathered the transition from slavery to freedom in what became known as the Refugees Home at Camp Nelson. (Continue reading part 3)

 

FURTHER READING

In recent years, historians have reconstructed Black families’ journeys to Camp Nelson and the details surrounding the infamous November 23, 1864 expulsion. A good starting place is Richard Sears’s Camp Nelson, Kentucky (2002), an edited collection of primary sources documenting the camp’s entire existence. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation series 2 (The Black Military Experience), also features primary sources related to Black recruitment and Black family life at Camp Nelson. [17]

One of the first scholarly treatments of the expulsion, Victor Howard’s Black Liberation in Kentucky (1983), combs through army records to provide a detailed analysis of Black families’ fight for inclusion at Camp Nelson. [18] More recently, Amy Taylor’s essay, “How a Cold Snap in Kentucky Led to Freedom for Thousands” (2011) and her subsequent book Embattled Freedom (2018) show how the humanitarian crisis at Camp Nelson prodded congressional lawmakers to action. [19]

 

NOTES

[1] Affidavit of Patsey Leach, March 25, 1865, in Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 268-269.

[2] J. Bates Dickson to Capt. T.E. Hall, June 20, 1864, Lexington, Ky., in Sears, Camp Nelson, 72-73; Dickson to Sedgwick, June 30, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 87.

[3] OR, ser 3, v4, pt 1, 467, 474, [WEB]; Thomas to S.G. Hicks, July 17, 1864, in Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 260-261.

[4] OR, ser 3, v4, pt 1, 474, [WEB].

[5] Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 260-262.

[6] Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky Emancipation and Freedom, 1862-1884 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 113-114; Order of Brig. Gen. Speed Smith Fry, July 6, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 93-94. On July 28, 1864, assistant adjutant general C.W. Foster replied to Thomas: “ Although the law prohibits the return of slaves to their owners by the military authorities, yet it does not provide for their reception and support in idleness at military camps.” See Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 263. Foster’s unhelpful reply did not address whether Thomas’s orders were in fact in violation of the revised Articles of War.

[7] Report of Butler, Sears, Camp Nelson, 83-84.

[8] Taylor, Embattled Freedom,201; Taylor, “How a Cold Snap in Kentucky Led to Freedom for Thousands: An Environmental Story of Emancipation,” 191-214, in Stephen Berry (ed.), Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

[9] Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 269-271; Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 201.

[10] Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 269-271.

[11] Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 269-271.; Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 202-203; Taylor, “How a Cold Snap.”

[12] Hall, quoted in Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky, 116; Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 202-203; Taylor, “How a Cold Snap”; New York Tribune, quoted in Sears, Camp Nelson, 138.

[13] Burbridge to Fry, November 27, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 137; Townsend to Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army, December 2, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 146

[14] Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 203.

[15] Cong Globe, 38th Cong, 2nd sess., 160-162.

[16] Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky, 79.

[17] Sears, Camp Nelson; Freedom ser. 2 (The Black Military Experience).

[18] Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky, esp. chap. 8.

[19] Taylor, “How a Cold Snap”; Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 174-208.

This post is the first of three posts on the Camp Nelson Stampede:  see also Enslaved Women (Part 2) and Freedom and Community (Part 3)

DATELINE: JUNE 4, 1864, CAMP NELSON, KY

“Within a few days the negroes of Kentucky have become impressed with the idea that the road to freedom lies through military service, and there has been a stampede from the farms to the recruiting offices.”  [1]  So reported the Cincinnati Commercial on June 4, 1864. The federal government had finally opened enlistment–and thus a pathway to freedom–to enslaved men in the Bluegrass State. However, there was a catch: enslaved men first needed to secure their slaveholders’ consent to enlist. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1864, enslaved Kentuckians refused to take no for an answer; they were determined to enlist and gain their freedom, with or without their slaveholders’ approval. In just a matter of weeks, the initial stampede of enslaved men to recruiting offices and Camp Nelson pressured the US army into opening its ranks to all enslaved Kentuckians. 

 

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

Unlike many pre-war group escapes in Kentucky, the “stampede” to Camp Nelson was not a single group of freedom seekers with one shared starting point; rather it consisted of a succession of group escapes originating from throughout the counties surrounding Camp Nelson. Collectively, those group escapes amounted to one of the largest wartime “stampedes”—thousands of enslaved men, women, and children escaped to Camp Nelson starting in the summer of 1864 and continuing through the summer of 1865.

Right from the beginning, newspapers employed the term “stampede” to describe freedom seekers’ rush to Camp Nelson.  The Cincinnati Commercial described “a stampede from the farms to the recruiting offices.” Papers in Cleveland and San Francisco reprinted the Commercial’s original story under new headlines that described the “Exodus of Negroes from Kentucky.” [2]

Newspapers continued to use the term “stampede” to describe occasional upticks in the number of freedom seekers heading to Camp Nelson. In April 1865, a correspondent from Danville, Kentucky commented that “the stampede of negroes from this region to Camp Nelson has received a new impulse within a few days” due to rumors that the camp might close its doors. [3] Several months later in June 1865, a correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial described another “stampede” after enslaved Kentuckians eavesdropped on a local politician’s speech insisting that Kentucky could maintain slavery for another seven years. “There happened to be quite a number of darkies listening to him, and the idea of seven years more of slavery was so distasteful to them that they concluded immediately to take the short cut to freedom via the army,” the journalist wryly reported. “Accordingly, they not only went themselves, but got all their neighbors to join them in a stampede for the nearest recruiting station.” [4]

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

The US army originally established Camp Nelson in 1863 as a supply depot, not as a center for African American recruitment. The camp was located in Kentucky, a loyal slave state which continued to fiercely resist federal antislavery policies. In hopes of appealing to white Kentuckians, President Abraham Lincoln had exempted the Bluegrass State from his Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. The Lincoln administration also held off enlisting enslaved Kentuckians into the US army, even though by mid-1863 the federal government had already begun recruiting enslaved men as soldiers in other border slave states such as Maryland and Missouri. [5]

Finally in April 1864, the US army’s manpower needs led federal officials to authorize limited Black recruitment in Kentucky. US general Stephen Burbridge sought to soften the blow by making several key concessions to Kentucky slaveholders. First, the federal government would compensate slaveholders $300 for each enslaved recruit. Secondly, prospective recruits needed to secure their slaveholder’s permission before they could enlist. Third, the US army would not send recruiters out onto plantations to enlist enslaved men, but would require enslaved recruits to journey to recruiting offices run by provost marshals (the army’s military police) where they could enlist. [6]

Enslaved men were determined to enlist, with or without their slaveholder’s blessing. As US officials quickly recognized, it proved almost impossible to determine on the spot whether slaveholders had actually given consent. At least some provosts went ahead and enlisted enslaved men without their slaveholders’ approval. In May 1864, a group of 15 enslaved men presented themselves for enlistment at the provost marshal’s office in Stanford, Kentucky. Even though only five of the recruits had their slaveholders’ consent to enlist, the local provost marshal forwarded all 15 men to Camp Nelson. [7] More often, US officials demanded hard proof of slaveholders’ consent. The provost marshal at Berea, Kentucky only agreed to enlist enslaved men who came to his recruiting office accompanied by their slaveholder. If he “let the slave[s] come and enlist at their own option,” the provost marshal explained, “all [the] slave men in the county would come.” [8] 

Turning away prospective recruits left enslaved men vulnerable to violent reprisals by slaveholders and white Kentuckians, who were determined to stop Black enlistment at all costs. On May 10, a group of 17 enslaved men traveled from Green County more than 20 miles to Lebanon, where provost marshal James Fidler “kindly received” them, but explained that he would need written proof that their slaveholders had consented to them enlisting. Fidler supplied each man with “notes to their owners asking that the negroes be permitted to enlist.” Fidler’s attempt to follow the fine print of federal policy ended in tragedy. White Kentuckians “followed these black men from town, seized them and whipped them most unmercifully with cow-hides.” Declaring that “negro enlistment should not take place in Lebanon,” local whites threatened the provost marshal “with a mob” should he attempt to enlist any Black recruits. [9]

Slaveholders also stepped up violence towards enslaved women, both in retaliation for their husbands enlisting and also to dissuade them from any designs they might have on joining their husbands at Camp Nelson. “My master beat me over the head with an axe handle,” enslaved Kentuckian Clarissa Burdett later testified, “saying as he did so that he beat me for letting [husband] Ely Burdett go off…. He bruised my head so that I could not lay it against a pillow without the greatest pain.” [10] Whenever opportunity presented itself, enslaved women gathered their children and slipped away to Camp Nelson, where they hoped to reunite their families.

Enslaved Kentuckians who withstood the violence and reached Camp Nelson met with a disappointing reception from the US army. When 250 enslaved men “thirsting for freedom” departed Danville, Kentucky on May 23 bound for Camp Nelson, students at Centre College “assailed them with stones and the contents of revolvers.” The men braved the assault and made it the sixteen miles to Camp Nelson later that same afternoon, only to be turned away by camp commandant Col. A.H. Clark, who claimed he “had no authority” to muster them into the army. [11]

Clark was even less sympathetic to the many enslaved women who had risked it all to accompany their husbands to Camp Nelson. Clark ordered his subordinates to exclude enslaved women from camp and threaten that “if they return, the lash awaits them.” [12] Despite US officials’ best efforts to keep them out, enslaved women kept coming back, determined never return to slavery and intent on keeping their families together. “There is not one among two hundred that want to go,” conceded one US army official, who acknowledged that enslaved women believe “that they will be killed by their masters if they return.” [13]

 

AFTERMATH

By June 1864, rampant violence against enslaved recruits prompted federal officials to open up enlistment to all enslaved men in Kentucky. “It became absolutely necessary for the protection of the slave to enlist him without the consent of the owner,” explained provost marshal James Fidler in Lebanon, Kentucky. [14] Federal officials back in Washington agreed. “In view of the cruelties practiced in the State of Kentucky by owners of slaves towards recruits,” assistant adjutant general C.W. Foster suggested that the US army should “accept and enlist any slave who may present himself for enlistment,” regardless of whether their slaveholder approved. In mid-June, US officials in Kentucky announced that the army would now accept the services of any enslaved men willing to enlist, regardless of whether their slaveholder approved. [15] 

However, the reworked federal policy still did not clarify the status of enslaved women and children who crowded into Camp Nelson alongside their husbands and fathers. Despite the US army’s best efforts to keep them out, enslaved women would continue to head to Camp Nelson in an effort to keep their families together. (Continue reading part 2)

 

FURTHER READING

A robust body of scholarship has highlighted Camp Nelson’s importance as a redoubt for Black emancipation in slaveholding Kentucky. A good starting place is Richard Sears’s Camp Nelson, Kentucky (2002), an edited collection of primary sources covering the camp’s existence. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation series 2 (The Black Military Experience), also features primary sources related to Black recruitment and Black family life at Camp Nelson. [16]

Historians have also explored the experiences of freedom seekers heading to Camp Nelson, as well as the site’s continuing significance to public memory of the Civil War. Amy Taylor’s Embattled Freedom (2018) foregrounds the experiences of freedom seeker Gabriel Burdett, his wife Clarissa, and their family as they sought liberation at Camp Nelson. [17] W. Stephen McBride argues in “Camp Nelson and Kentucky’s Civil War Memory” (2013) that the Camp Nelson National Monument remains an important site in shaping public memory of the Civil War. By highlighting the crucial contributions Black men and women made to US victory, Camp Nelson gives lie to Lost Cause narratives which downplay the centrality of emancipation. [18]

 

[1] Cincinnati Commercial, June 4, 1864, quoted in “Kentucky Negro Exodus,” Cleveland (OH) Daily Herald, June 6, 1864, p. 4.

[2] “Kentucky Negro Exodus,” Cleveland (OH) Daily Herald, June 6, 1864, p. 4; “Exodus of Negroes From Kentucky,” San Francisco (CA) Daily Evening Bulletin, June 29, 1864, p. 3; A July 1865 referred back to the “stampede of slaves from surrounding country” who “came here in May and June of ’64 by scores.” See “Refugee Home in Kentucky,” Worcester (MA) Spy, July 21, 1865, p. 2.

[3] “Stampede of Negroes,” Louisville (KY) Daily Journal, April 28, 1865, p. 1.

[4] Cincinnati Commercial quoted in, “How Dinah Got a Companion for Life,” New Orleans (LA) Times, June 19, 1865, p. 3.

[5] Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ser. 2 (The Black Military Experience), vol. 1, 193; Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 186-187.

[6] Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 193; Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 186-187.

[7] Robert E. Barron to the Provost Marshal at Camp Nelson, Kentucky, May 27, 1864, Stanford, Ky., RG 393, pt. 4, entry 1660, vol. 237DKy, pp. 417-418, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

[8] John G. Fee to Brother Jocelyn, May 11, 1864, Berea, Ky., in Richard D. Sears, Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 56-57.

[9] Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 257.

[10] Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 188.

[11] Report of Thomas Butler, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 58.

[12] “Slave-Hunting in Kentucky,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 18, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 63-65.

[13] Hanaford to McQueen, May 26, 1864, in  Sears, Camp Nelson, 60; Hanaford to Dickson, July 6, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 94.

[14] Freedom, ser. 2, vol. 1, 257.

[15]  The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), ser. 3, vol. 4, 422, [WEB]; Lorenzo Thomas, Special Order No. 20, June 13, 1864, cited in Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 187.

[16] Sears, Camp Nelson; Freedom ser. 2 (The Black Military Experience).

[17] Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 174-208, 221-230.

[18] W. Stephen McBride, “Camp Nelson and Kentucky’s Civil War Memory,” Historical Archaeology 47, no. 3 (2013): 69–80.

DATELINE: SEPTEMBER 24, 1852, MAYSVILLE, KY

Cannons thundered in salute as Whig presidential candidate Winfield Scott stepped off the dock at Maysville, Kentucky on Friday evening, September 24, 1852. Much like his Democratic rival, Franklin Pierce, Scott aimed to dodge the divisive issue of slavery in hopes of appealing to both Northern and Southern voters. But enslaved Kentuckians had other ideas. Their actions would make avoiding slavery all but impossible during the final weeks of the campaign. While many of their slaveholders traveled to Maysville that weekend and weighed whether to cast their ballots for the Whig nominee, more than 30 enslaved Kentuckians made a political decision of their own when they crossed the Ohio River on Saturday night, September 25 and exited slavery. [1] The latest “slave stampede” from the Kentucky borderlands led to an armed standoff between slaveholders and antislavery vigilance forces in Ripley, Ohio, ratcheting up sectional tensions on the eve of the 1852 presidential election.

 

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

Observers in Kentucky and across the nation were quick to label the mass escape a “stampede.” The headline from nearby Maysville, Kentucky lamented “Another Negro Stampede.” Meanwhile, New York Times and Richmond Enquirer reported on the “Great Slave Stampede” from Kentucky. Writing just days after the escape, Kentucky abolitionist John G. Fee estimated it to be “one of the largest stampedes, perhaps, ever known in the State, and at the same time successful.” [2]

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

Enslaved people in the border counties of Bracken and Mason correctly anticipated that the political festivities would provide them with an excellent opportunity to escape. After all, Scott’s visit to Maysville was just the highlight of a crowded lineup of political gatherings. Whigs held a convention nearby at Ripley, Ohio, while Scott continued to draw large crowds as he campaigned across northern Kentucky. The political fervor swept up countless white Kentuckians, including many slaveholders who flocked to hear Scott speak. “Their absence, no doubt, afforded the slaves a splendid opportunity to plot and mature their plans for escape,” suggested one Ohio editorialist. More than 30 enslaved people did just that on Saturday evening, September 25, leaving from the riverside towns of Augusta and Dover, Kentucky and crossing the Ohio River to Ripley. [3]

It was no accident that the large group of freedom seekers headed straight for Ripley, a riverside community known for its extensive Underground Railroad network. Ripley activists such as Presbyterian minister John Rankin, free Black John Parker, and white miller Thomas McCague regularly assisted freedom seekers. Parker, who later boasted that he had assisted over 400 people across multiple decades, often ventured into Kentucky to personally guide enslaved men and women across the Ohio River to Rankin’s home or McCague’s mill. Parker recalled one daring trip when he piloted a group of freedom seekers from the border counties of Kentucky to McCague’s home, where he instructed them to hide in some hay. This particular group of freedom seekers stood out in Parker’s memory, but not positively. The freedom seekers ignored his repeated pleas to lower their voices and in fact “became so noisy” that Parker and McCague had to relocate the group to McCague’s attic. The veteran abolitionists were “glad to get rid of them as soon as it was dark.” [4]

The unruly freedom seekers whom Parker described may well been those who left Augusta and Dover as part of the September 1852 “stampede,” but his recollection does not provide enough details to say for sure. What is clear is that the freedom seekers from Augusta and Dover reached McCague’s mill by Sunday morning, September 26, very possibly with assistance from Parker. [5]

Once in Ripley, the large group of freedom seekers split over strategy. The majority preferred to stay with McCague and wait until dark the next evening to continue their journey. A smaller contingent of five people insisted on pressing forward immediately. Their decision proved costly. Slaveholders eventually caught up with the smaller group about 35 miles north of Ripley and recaptured three individuals. [6]

Meanwhile, slaveholders had easily traced the larger group of freedom seekers to their hideout in Ripley. Around 2 am on Monday morning, September 27, slaveholders sleuthing around McCague’s mill discovered a bundle of clothing dropped by the freedom seekers. Slaveholders confidently proclaimed that they had “pinned” the runaways. Expecting to recapture the freedom seekers any minute, the Kentuckians requested that their neighbors hurry to Ripley to provide testimony to support their claims in potential legal proceedings. Emboldened by the news, more white Kentuckians streamed into Ripley, “armed to the teeth with double-barrelled shot guns, rifles, pistols, clubs and bowie-knives.” One Kentuckian even crossed the river toting “a carpet sack full of handcuffs.” [7]

Ripley’s free Black community was equally determined to protect the freedom seekers. Black residents armed themselves and laid siege to the hotel where the slave catchers had assembled. With both sides heavily armed, observers worried that the standoff might lead to bloodshed. “Fears are entertained of a serious disturbance,” a correspondent for the New York Herald reported on Monday, September 27 from across the river in Maysville. “The Kentuckians remain there on the watch, and are determined to recover the slaves.” [8] 

Ripley’s African American community spearheaded the resistance, though white residents also stonewalled slave catchers’ efforts. Local officials refused to grant slaveholders search warrants to enter McCague’s mill. Although free Black John Parker and several other Ripley abolitionists voluntarily permitted the Kentuckians to search their homes on Monday, September 27, they had no intention of actually assisting the slave catchers. Wherever the freedom seekers were concealed, Ripley abolitionists diverted the slave catchers down what proved to be a series of  dead ends. All the while, local residents taunted the Kentuckians after every failed search. “Each failure to make any discovery, was followed with the shout, hurra[h] for Hale,” a barbed reference to the Free Soil party’s presidential candidate, John P. Hale. [9] 

By Monday night, slaveholders’ earlier optimism had evaporated. Before long, the Kentuckians headed home empty-handed. The Maysville, Kentucky Eagle ruefully conceded that because of “the facilities for flight afforded in Ohio… the probability is that the residue [of freedom seekers] will make good their escape.” [10]

 

AFTERMATH

Slaveholders’ anger over the successful stampede put a large target on John Parker’s back. On Friday night, October 1, several Kentuckians attempted to kidnap the veteran abolitionist. Three Kentuckians, George Jennings, Charles Gibbons, and Burn Coburn, waited in a skiff on the river’s edge while they sent an enslaved man named William Carter to Parker’s front door. “I am a runaway, my wife and children are across the river,” Carter explained, pleading with Parker to cross the river with him and help his family escape. Fortunately for Parker, his wife Miranda “intuitively mistrusted the man.” After listening to Carter’s story, Parker agreed that “there was something radically wrong with his story and himself.” Parker pulled a pistol and Carter cracked. The enslaved man admitted that “he was only a decoy, sent by four men” who “were lying behind a log on the riverbank” waiting to seize Parker. One of the would-be kidnappers, Jennings, was Carter’s master, and had “threatened to kill him if he had not come and told the story he did.” [11] 

While Parker narrowly avoided kidnappers, observers throughout the country recognized that the latest successful “slave stampede” had the potential to escalate sectional tensions right on the eve of the presidential election. “The escape of the troop of slaves from Kentucky into Ohio, and probably thence to Canada, will be a source of a great irritation in that part of the country,” predicted the Washington correspondent for the New York Times. [12]  Kentucky abolitionist minister John G. Fee feared that the state’s nascent antislavery political movement would be blamed for the stampede and was astonished when the Free Soil party’s vice presidential nominee, George W. Julian, was able to campaign unmolested across Mason and Bracken counties only days after the mass escape from those very same counties. “One of the largest stampedes, perhaps, ever known in the State, and at the same time successful, has just come off,” Fee boasted, “yet no disturbance in our meetings.” Fee thought he had witnessed “a wiping out of Mason and Dixon’s line” and the “partial destruction of the prejudice between North and South.” [13]

Fee’s hopes for sectional detente proved short-lived, however, because slaveholders in Kentucky and across the South quickly concentrated their ire on Ripley residents who had defied the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act by assisting the freedom seekers. “It is beyond question that fugitive slaves are afforded protection, means and facilities, by people of Ohio, regardless of the obligations and duties devolved on them by the Constitution and Laws of the United States,” complained the Maysville Eagle just days after the standoff in Ripley. The Eagle issued a stern warning to its neighbors across the Ohio River: “the people of Kentucky cannot, will not, and ought not longer to submit to such outrage upon their property rights.” Ripley residents who jeered slave catchers with shouts for Free Soil party presidential candidate John Hale “may laugh now,” the Eagle ominously predicted, “but they will not mock when the Kentuckians, wronged, robbed, outraged, and derided as they have been, shall be roused to vengeance.” [14] The Louisville Courier likewise denounced the “reprehensible” conduct of Ripley officials and reported that “great indignation… pervades the entire community from whence the slaves escaped.” [15] In fact, the resistance in Ripley incited outrage across the South. As far away as Raleigh, North Carolina, a proslavery editor denounced the resistance in Ripley as a “monstrous outrage” and hoped that the Kentuckians would “crush the black armed mob who thus dare to outrage the law of the land.” [16]

Although the stampede did not alter the outcome of the presidential contest––which Democrat Franklin Pierce won handily––it did contribute to the American public’s mounting sense that group escapes were becoming more frequent since the Compromise of 1850. “It seems as if there have been more cases of such ‘stampedes,’ (to use a phrase imported from Mexico,) during the last two years, since the Fugitive act has been in existence, than ever before,” remarked a correspondent for the New York Times. The correspondent attributed the growing trend of group escapes to enslaved people’s realization that a successful escape would require “parties of some force and numbers” who “must go prepared to fight.” [17] 

 

FURTHER READING

The two most detailed contemporary accounts of the stampede include a report (apparently from a Kentucky newspaper) reprinted at length in a Raleigh, North Carolina newspaper, and a Ripley resident’s account of the confrontation written on October 4 and subsequently published in a Cleveland newspaper. [18] The mass escape has received no sustained coverage in scholarly works to date.

 

ADDITIONAL IMAGES

 

NOTES

[1] “Gen. Scott in Maysville,” Maysville Eagle, September 25, 1852, quoted in Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, September 28, 1852; “Great Slave Stampede,” New York (NY) Herald, September 29, 1852.

[2] Maysville Eagle, quoted in “Another Negro Stampede,” Louisville (KY) Daily Journal, October 2, 1852; “Great Slave Stampede,” New York (NY) Herald, September 29, 1852; “Stampede of Slaves,” Washington (DC) Daily Republic, September 30, 1852 “Great Slave Stampede,” Richmond (VA) Enquirer, October 1, 1852; “A Stampede of Slaves,” Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch,October 1, 1852; “Slave Stampede,” Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, October 4, 1852; “Great Slave Stampede,” Raleigh (NC) North Carolina Star, October 6, 1852; “Another Stampede,” Kenosha (WI) Telegraph,  October 8, 1852; “Slave Stampede,” Meigs County (OH) Telegraph, October 19, 1852; “Great Slave Stampede,” Natchez (MS) Mississippi Free Trader, October 20, 1852; Rocklin (CA) Placer Herald, November 13, 1852. For Fee’s remark, see “C.M. Clay and Geo. W. Julian,” Washington (DC) National Era, October 14, 1852.

[3] “The Stampede,” Cleveland (OH) Leader, October 14, 1852.

[4] John P. Parker, Stuart Seely Sprague (ed.), His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 138-139.

[5] “Great Slave Stampede,” Raleigh (NC) North Carolina Star, October 6, 1852; “The Stampede,” Cleveland (OH) Leader, October 14, 1852.

[6] “Great Slave Stampede,” New York (NY) Herald, September 29, 1852; Maysville Eagle, quoted in “Another Negro Stampede,” Louisville (KY) Daily Journal, October 2, 1852; “Great Slave Stampede,” Raleigh (NC) North Carolina Star, October 6, 1852.

[7] “Great Slave Stampede,” Raleigh (NC) North Carolina Star, October 6, 1852; “The Stampede,” Cleveland (OH) Leader, October 14, 1852.

[8] “Great Slave Stampede,” New York (NY) Herald, September 29, 1852.

[9] “The Stampede,” Cleveland (OH) Leader, October 14, 1852.

[10] Maysville Eagle, quoted in “Another Negro Stampede,” Louisville (KY) Daily Journal, October 2, 1852.

[11] “The Stampede,” Cleveland (OH) Leader, October 14, 1852; Parker, His Promised Land, 146-151. Parker recalled that the attempted kidnapping took place in July, but he was relating the story decades later to a reporter. However, Parker’s account closely matches the description provided in early October 1852 by a Ripley resident (whose letter appeared in a Cleveland newspaper), so much so that I feel confident both accounts refer to the same attempted kidnapping.

[12] “Washington – Flight of Negroes,” New York (NY) Times, October 4, 1852.

[13] “C.M. Clay and Geo. W. Julian,” Washington (DC) National Era, October 14, 1852.

[14] Maysville Eagle, quoted in “Another Negro Stampede,” Louisville (KY) Daily Journal, October 2, 1852.

[15] “Slave Stampede,” Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, October 4, 1852.

[16] “Great Slave Stampede,” Raleigh (NC) North Carolina Star, October 6, 1852.

[17] “Washington – Flight of Negroes,” New York (NY) Times, October 4, 1852.

[18] “Great Slave Stampede,” Raleigh (NC) North Carolina Star, October 6, 1852; “The Stampede,” Cleveland (OH) Leader, October 14, 1852.

DATELINE: NOVEMBER 5, 1861, CAMP NEVIN, TEN MILES SOUTH OF ELIZABETHTOWN, KY

US general Alexander McDowell McCook hardly knew what to do about the enslaved people making a beeline for his camp from all over central Kentucky. Freedom seekers had been “a source of annoyance” to the general ever since he pitched camp along the banks of the Nolin River some 10 miles south of Elizabethtown, but the number and frequency of escapes seemed to be increasing daily. “Ten have come into my Camp within as many hours,” McCook reported on November 5, “and from what they say, there will be a general Stampeed of slaves from the other side of Green River.” Enslaved Kentuckians had been emboldened to run to US army lines by news of the federal government’s various new antislavery policies. But McCook’s primary concern remained keeping Kentucky in the Union, and for the time being that meant conciliating slaveholders. Instead of receiving the freedom seekers per War Department policy, McCook proposed “to send for their master’s and diliver [sic] the negro’s to them on the out-side of our lines.” [1] Group escapes forced otherwise reluctant US generals like McCook to take action and address slavery, though not always the type of action enslaved people wanted. In the critical border state of Kentucky, the official response of US military and civil authorities throughout the fall of 1861 continued to tilt in favor of conciliating slaveholders.

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

In an internal report to his superior officer on November 5, US general Alexander McCook described the growing pattern of group escapes and expressed concern that his camp would soon be overrun by “a general Stampeed of slaves.” [2] Contemporary newspapers described the series of escapes to Camp Nevin, but so far no articles have been identified which refer to the escapes as a stampede.

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the slave state of Kentucky officially remained neutral. But after Confederate forces disregarded neutrality and entered the state in September, US forces responded by moving into position in northern and central Kentucky.

As soon as US forces entered the state, enslaved Kentuckians wasted little time running to US lines, encouraged by the federal government’s new antislavery policies. In May, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler declared enslaved people who ran to his lines at Fort Monroe, Virginia to be “contraband of war,” and refused to return them to their Confederate slaveholders. The contraband decision applied to enslaved people fleeing Confederate territory, but lawmakers in Washington soon expanded the scope of federal antislavery policies to include the border states as well. On July 9, House Republicans affirmed in a non-binding resolution that “it is no part of the duty of the soldiers of the United States to capture and return fugitive slaves.” [3] Less than a month later, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act. The law did not explicitly free anyone, but authorized US armies to seize any enslaved people forced by their slaveholders to labor for the Confederacy. It remained less clear how to distinguish which enslaved people had been forced to labor for the Confederacy. On August 8, Secretary of War Simon Cameron instructed US generals to receive all enslaved people, regardless of whether their enslavers were loyal or disloyal, while promising that the federal government would eventually compensate loyal slaveholders. [4]

But most US generals remained concerned that Kentucky might still secede and took pains not to alienate slaveholders in the state, even if that meant flouting federal antislavery policies. “It is absolutely necessary that we shall hold all the State of Kentucky,” insisted the US Army’s new general-in-chief, George B. McClellan, in early November, and “that the majority of its inhabitants shall be warmly in favor of our cause.” To that end, McClellan issued strict orders forbidding US generals from interfering with Kentucky’s “domestic institutions,” a familiar euphemism for slavery. [5]

Even before McClellan’s instructions, most US generals in Kentucky were already taking care not to interfere with slavery. From his headquarters in Louisville, Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman repeatedly returned freedom seekers who reached his lines throughout October. When an enslaved man escaped from neighboring Spencer County into Sherman’s camp, Sherman saw that the man was turned over to local authorities in Louisville. [6] Several days later, two slaveholders complained to Sherman that soldiers belonging to the 19^th Illinois Infantry were sheltering freedom seekers in their camp. Sherman promptly reprimanded the regiment’s commander, Col. John B. Turchin. “My orders are that all negroes shall be delivered up on claim of the owner or agent,” Sherman reiterated. As far as Sherman was concerned, “the laws of the state of Kentucky are in full force,” which meant that “negroes must be surrendered on application of their masters or agents or delivered over to the sheriff of the County.” [7] 

Civil authorities at the federal, state, and local levels agreed with Sherman that the federal government’s antislavery policies did not change anything for slaveholders in a loyal state like Kentucky. State and local slave codes remained in force, as did the federal 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. When an enslaved man escaped from Louisville and crossed the Ohio River into southern Indiana, slaveholder E.L. Huffman turned to federal civil authorities in Indiana to recapture and return the freedom seeker under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. On Friday, October 11, the U.S. marshal for Indiana, D.G. Rose, captured the freedom seeker. U.S. Commissioner Reginald H. Hall, a Democrat from southern Indiana, held a brief rendition hearing and promptly remanded the man to slavery under the federal law. Louisville newspapers praised the federal civil officials who had “faithfully and fearlessly execute[d] the laws of the United States” and “defend[ed] the rights of Kentucky.” [8] In the meantime, state authorities worked to limit the war’s destabilizing impacts on slavery by discouraging US soldiers from assisting freedom seekers. The Kentucky state assembly in session at Frankfort weighed a proposal to punish any US military personnel “who shall aid, assist, encourage, or attempt to authorize a slave to escape” with a minimum one-year sentence in the state penitentiary. [9] 

From his advanced position at Camp Nevin, US general Alexander McCook followed the lead of Sherman and civil authorities by assisting slaveholders seeking to recapture freedom seekers. When slaveholder Rebecca Hill from nearby Elizabethtown showed up at McCook’s headquarters on October 15 grumbling that his soldiers were harboring an enslaved man, McCook promptly ordered his camp provost marshal, Capt. Orris Blake of the 39^th Indiana Infantry, to “make diligent search for a negro boy.” [10] Had the number of freedom seekers remained relatively low and infrequent, McCook might have continued to placate disgruntled slaveholders who one-by-one appeared at his camp by simply ordering the provost marshal to conduct a sweep of the camp. 

But enslaved Kentuckians had other ideas and kept running to Camp Nevin in mounting numbers throughout late October and early November 1861, carefully couching their statements to US officials in the language of the First Confiscation Act. Well aware that the recently passed law authorized US armies to seize enslaved people forced to labor for the Confederacy, freedom seekers repeatedly told US officials that their slaveholders had joined the Confederate army and forced them to transport supplies to Confederate troops or otherwise aid enemy forces. On November 4, McCook reported the arrival of six freedom seekers who informed him that their “masters have run away and joined the southern army.” [11] By the time McCook sat down to write a follow-up report to Sherman the next day, the number of freedom seekers had swelled to 10. This group had crossed the Green River on Sunday night, November 3 and covered some 50 miles to reach Camp Nevin by Tuesday, November 5. “They state the reasons of their running away,” McCook recorded, “there [their] masters are rank Secessionists, in some cases are in the rebel army,” and that “their master’s [sic] had notified them to be ready to go south with them on Monday Morning [November 4].” The freedom seekers also told McCook that many more enslaved people were preparing to escape, prompting the exasperated US general to predict  that “there will be a general Stampeed of slaves from the other side of the Green River.” [12] That prophecy seemed to be fulfilled on Thursday, November 8, when another “batch of eight slaves” arrived at Camp Nevin, having escaped “from the Green River country or beyond.” At least “one or two” of those eight freedom seekers had previously escaped to Camp Nevin, only to be returned to slavery. For the time being, McCook turned all the freedom seekers over to Provost Marshal Blake, “who is as yet sorely puzzled to know what to do with them,” according to a report in the Louisville Courier. [13] The growing trend of group escapes presented a problem for McCook, not because he secretly sympathized with slaveholders, but because the large number of freedom seekers within his camp seemed to confirm white Kentuckians’ suspicions that the US army intended to interfere with slavery. “The subject of Contraband negros is one that is looked to, by the Citizens of Kentucky of vital importance,” McCook began his November 5 report to Sherman. If the freedom seekers “be allowed to remain here,” McCook worried, “our cause in Kentucky may be injured.” Pro-secessionist Kentuckians “bolster themselves up, by making the uninformed believe that this is a war upon African slavery.” McCook had “no great desire to protect [Kentucky’s] pet institution Slavery” and made clear that he was “very far from wishing these recreant masters in possession of any of their property.” But keeping Kentucky in the Union took precedence over all else. To assure white Kentuckians that the US army’s presence did not portend general emancipation, McCook proposed “to send for their master’s and diliver the negro’s [sic] to them on the out-side of our lines.” [14]

 

AFTERMATH

General Sherman agreed that the US military’s interests lay in conciliating Kentucky slaveholders. On November 8, Sherman ordered McCook to return the freedom seekers. “We have nothing to do with them [enslaved people] at all and you should not let them take refuge in Camp,” Sherman advised. “It forms a source of misrepresentation by which Union men are estranged from our Cause.” [15] The ultimate fate of the freedom seekers remains unclear. Although Sherman clearly directed McCook to return them, no record survives. Some of the freedom seekers may have eluded recapture with help from free Black servants working for the US army or enlisted men sympathetic to their plight. 

For his part, General McCook seemed willing to return freedom seekers well into the spring of 1862, even after US forces had made inroads into the Confederate state of Tennessee. A Nashville, Tennessee paper praised McCook’s “courteous and gentlemanly” treatment of slaveholders, which “acquit the Federal army and its officers of conniving at the escape of slaves.” Antislavery papers did not see it that way and attacked General McCook for his conciliatory approach to slaveholders. The Liberator reprinted the Nashville paper’s glowing report on McCook under the damning headline, “How General McCook Conciliates the Rebels.” Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson read the Liberator’s searing critique on the Senate floor in May while concluding that McCook was among the “generals at the West who think they do their duty best when they serve slavery.” [16]

 

FURTHER READING

The correspondence between McCook and Sherman is reprinted in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation. [17] Although McCook biographer Wayne Faneburst discusses the group escapes to Camp Nevin and the negative reputation McCook gained among antislavery circles for his willingness to return freedom seekers, few scholars of wartime emancipation have taken notice of the stampede. [18]

 

NOTES

[1] Alexander McDowell McCook to William Tecumseh Sherman, November 5, 1861, Camp Nevin, Ky., RG 393, pt. 1, entry 3534, box 1, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, excerpted in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation ser. 1, vol. 1, 519-520.

[2] McCook to Sherman, November 5, 1861, RG 393, pt. 1, entry 3534, box 1, NARA, excerpted in Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 1, 519-520.

[3] Cong. Globe, 37^th Cong., 1^st Sess., 32; James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 112-113.

[4] Oakes, Freedom National, 122-139.

[5] George B. McClellan to Don Carlos Buell, November 7, 1861, Washington, DC, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), ser. 2, vol. 1, 776-777.

[6] Louisville, KY Courier, October 12, 1861, p3, c2.

[7] William T. Sherman to John B. Turchin, October 15, 1861, Louisville, Ky., OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, p. 774; Sherman to McCook, November 8, 1861, Louisville, Ky., excerpted in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation ser. 1, vol. 1, 519-520.

[8] “Fugitive Slave Returned from Indiana,” Louisville, KY Courier, October 15, 1861, p2, c3; “Fugitive Slave Returned,” Louisville, KY Daily Democrat, October 15, 1861, p2, c1.

[9] “Kentucky Legislature,” Louisville, KY Courier, September 30, 1861, p3, c3.

[10] Special Order No. 4, October 15, 1861, Camp Nevin, Ky., RG 393, pt. 2, entry 6465, vol. 149/246DO, NARA.

[11] McCook to Sherman, November 4, 1861, quoted in Wayne Fanebust, Major General Alexander M. McCook, USA: A Civil War Biography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 70.

[12] McCook to Sherman, November 5, 1861, RG 393, pt. 1, entry 3534, box 1, NARA, excerpted in Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 1, 519-520.

[13] “Contrabands,” Louisville, KY Courier, November 12, 1861, p3, c1.

[14] McCook to Sherman, November 5, 1861, RG 393, pt. 1, entry 3534, box 1, NARA, excerpted in Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 1, 519-520.

[15] Sherman to McCook, November 8, 1861, Louisville, Ky., excerpted in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation ser. 1, vol. 1, 519-520.

[16] “How General McCook Conciliates the Rebels,” Boston Liberator, April 11, 1862, p3, c2; Cong. Globe, 37^th Cong., 2^nd Sess., 1893. For other allegations that McCook was overly sympathetic to slaveholders (some of which were made by his political enemies), see Faneburst, Major General Alexander M. McCook, 70-71. 

[17] McCook to Sherman, November 5, 1861, RG 393, pt. 1, entry 3534, box 1, NARA, excerpted in Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 1, 519-520; Sherman to McCook, November 8, 1861, Louisville, Ky., also excerpted in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation ser. 1, vol. 1, pp. 519-520. McCook’s letter and Sherman’s response are also reprinted in OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, 776-777.

[18] Faneburst, Major General Alexander M. McCook, 70-71. 

DATELINE: AUGUST 5, 1848, LEXINGTON, KY

The sound of spirituals and dancing startled the white residents in Lexington, Kentucky from their sleep on Saturday night, August 5, 1848. Enslaved Kentuckians had gathered from miles around to hold another religious meeting just outside town. Annoyed but not alarmed, Lexington slaveholders did their best to ignore the festivities. But this occasion was different. When the services concluded, more than 40 enslaved men “arrayed in warlike manner,” armed themselves with “guns, pistols, knives and other warlike weapons,” and started north from Lexington along the Russell Cave Road. An Irish immigrant and professed ally of the freedom seekers, Edward J. “Patrick” Doyle, led the group towards the Ohio River. Newspapers in Kentucky and across the nation quickly labeled the mass escape attempt a “slave stampede.” [1] Perhaps more than any other single episode, the Lexington stampede helped define the powerful new “slave stampede” metaphor as an escape involving large numbers of heavily armed freedom seekers––what many pro- and antislavery readers alike understood as a form of mobile insurrection.

 

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

In August 1848, the “slave stampede” metaphor was barely a year old. Editors for the Lexington Atlas thought the term well-suited to describe the mass escape from their community and ran the headline “Stampede Among the Negroes” on Tuesday, August 8. Other papers in Kentucky and across the nation followed suit. Over 40 articles nationwide referred to the escape as a “stampede,” with some newspapers styling it the “great slave stampede” or “the giant stampede of negroes from the interior of Kentucky.” [2]

MAIN NARRATIVE

Edward J. “Patrick” Doyle had a checkered past by the time he suddenly appeared in Lexington, Kentucky during the summer of 1848. An Irish immigrant in his early 20s, Doyle had been expelled for bad behavior from the St. Rose Priory in Springfield, Kentucky, and again from the St. Thomas Seminary in Bardstown. Doyle then vocally renounced his Catholicism, claimed that vengeful Catholics had tried to murder him, and secured admission to Centre College in Danville, Kentucky by assuring school officials that he was a sincere Protestant convert. Academics were the least of Doyle’s troubles, however. Doyle’s criminal record was extensive. Authorities in Louisville had arrested him for trying to sell free Black Ohioans into slavery. Only weeks before Doyle arrived in Lexington in 1848, officials in Frankfort had jailed him on theft charges. Historian James Prichard has concluded that at his core, Doyle was an opportunist “willing to play both sides of any controversy if it lined his pockets.” [3]

But none of that was known to enslaved people near Lexington, Kentucky who saw Doyle as a potential liberator. Soon after Doyle arrived in Lexington, he began approaching enslaved residents and offering to guide them to freedom––for a fee. “A man named Doyle came to me and told me that he would pilot me across the Ohio river for $100,” recalled Harry Slaughter, then 32-years-old and enslaved near Lexington. Slaughter had extra motivation. The rest of his family and his girlfriend were free, and Slaughter “wanted to marry my sweetheart as a free man and not as a slave.” [4]

Doyle and enslaved Kentuckians like Slaughter managed to assemble a large group of freedom seekers to make a dash for the Ohio River. The enslaved came from the households of some of Lexington’s most prominent residents, including Jack, an enslaved man who escaped from prominent Kentucky politician and gradual emancipation advocate Cassius M. Clay. Reports placed the total number of freedom seekers anywhere from 40 to 80. For its part, the Lexington Atlas calculated that 66 freedom seekers had escaped. Harry Slaughter remembered that the group consisted of “Doyle and forty-five of us negroes.” What is clear is that the escape was carefully planned down to the pretext and the day of the week. Leaders of the escape correctly assumed that assembling for a religious meeting would allay any suspicions local whites might have about such a large gathering of enslaved people, and also that by leaving on a Saturday night their absence would go mostly unnoticed by slaveholders until Monday. [5]

Traveling all night Saturday, hiding during the daylight hours, and traveling again all night Sunday, the freedom seekers covered 25 miles from Lexington to Ruddells Mills undetected. The runaways fed themselves on ears of corn gathered along the way. But on Monday morning, August 7, local residents caught wind of the mass escape quietly passing through their neighborhood. Two young boys spotted the freedom seekers concealed in the woods near Ruddells Mill and rushed to notify local authorities. Around the same time, two freedom seekers (who were not identified by name) enslaved by Lexington lawyers T. Scott and B. Gratz strayed from the group in search of food and walked right into slaveholders in nearby Claysville. The two captives eventually admitted that there were “between 40 and 70 negroes… in the neighborhood, concealed in the woods,” which was “the first intimation the people of Harrison [county] had of the stampede.” To make matters worse for the freedom seekers, large crowds had already assembled at local polling places for that day’s gubernatorial election. Voters quickly mobilized in pursuit of the runaways. [6]

The freedom seekers and a slave-catching posse clashed twice on Monday evening, August 7, and both times the freedom seekers beat back their would-be captors and wounded pursuers. The first fight began around 7 pm, when Claysville physician Dr. B.F. Barkley and his posse of 10 men overtook the freedom seekers who were “encamped and fortified” northeast of Claysville on the Germantown road.  Heavily armed and outnumbering their pursuers, the freedom seekers opened fire and forced Barkley’s ten men to retreat. One shot struck Harrison County resident and Mexican War veteran Charles H. Fowler in the left kidney, badly wounding him. [7]

Minutes later, 10 more Harrison County residents arrived and Barkley made a second attempt to subdue the freedom seekers. Once again, the freedom seekers repulsed the assault and wounded yet another pursuer, peppering Joseph Duncan’s hat with bullet holes and then shooting his horse out from under him, “throwing him in the midst of the negroes.” Duncan used his revolver at close range and “succeeded in fighting his way through them,” though not before a freedom seeker knocked out a tooth. Still outnumbered, Duncan and the rest of Barkley’s posse retreated for a second time. “They [the freedom seekers] appear determined to fight for every inch of ground,” concluded the pursuers, “and are commanded by a white man or more.” Pursuers reported that Doyle “encouraged the blacks to rally and fire, at all times, when our boys would come on them.” [8]

But the freedom seekers had lost the advantage of secrecy, and soon would lose their advantage in numbers too. As reports of the stampede and fighting spread, Kentucky militia general Lucius Desha mobilized several hundred men from Harrison and Bracken counties to surround the freedom seekers and block their path to the Ohio River. Meanwhile, Cynthiana residents informed Lexington slaveholders by express dispatch that “your negroes are supposed to be surrounded” near the Harrison-Bracken county line and requested that the city send a “fresh set of men immediately, say 50 or 100, well armed.” To make the point abundantly clear, Cynthiana residents added tersely: “Send all you can and speedily, or all will be lost…. Come if you want any of your negroes. We have not time to say more.” Within hours of the dispatch reaching Lexington, authorities called a public meeting and quickly raised “fifty or sixty armed men.” [9]

By Tuesday, August 8, the stampede had lost its momentum and its leader. “Doyle left us early in the day,” recalled freedom seeker Harry Slaughter, “and we were without a leader.” As pursuers closed in, “the men scattered in all directions.” Slaughter and Shadrack stuck together and “determined to get to the Ohio river, if possible.” The two men crossed into Bracken County and were approaching the Licking River near Milford when pursuers overtook them. “We plunged in and swam and waded across,” but a posse of a dozen men quickly surrounded them, subduing Shadrack while Slaughter continued to resist. “I cried out in a loud voice: ‘I will not be taken! The man that kills me is my friend! I had rather die here and now than go back to slavery!'” Slaughter had thrown away his bowie knife “for fear that I might kill one of them,” but proudly remembered that “I fought them for five minutes with my first” before finally surrendering. In addition to Slaughter and Shadrack, vigilant whites had captured nine to 10 freedom seekers by Tuesday night, and around 40 by Wednesday evening (20 confined in the Claysville jail, and another 19 in Brooksville). [10]

The most anticipated capture came on Tuesday, when a scouting party apprehended Doyle  about eight miles north of Claysville along Drift Run. The captors “were with great difficulty restrained from hanging the prisoner on the spot,” but General Desha intervened and had Doyle brought before local authorities in Claysville and then moved to the county jail in Cynthiana. There, a crowd of “several hundred” threatened to storm the jail, chanting “Kill him! Shoot him!! Burn him!!” Fearing that angry residents might make good on their threats, Dr. Barkley returned that night and quietly transferred Doyle from Cynthiana to the Lexington jail. [11]

 

AFTERMATH

To slaveholders, the mass escape had looked alarmingly like a mobile insurrection. Decades later, freedom seeker Harry Slaughter would insist the stampede was not an insurrection, although he acknowledged the freedom seekers’ intention to defend themselves with force if necessary. “The movement was afterwards referred to as an ‘insurrection,’ but it was misnamed,” Slaughter explained. “We did not intend to fight unless attempts were made to capture us, but we pledged ourselves that if we were overtaken by white men and they made an effort to capture us we would fight as long as possible.” Slaughter’s distinction between defensive and offensive violence did not resonate with white Kentuckians. The criminal charges eventually brought against Doyle and Slaughter accused them of leading “a great multitude of negro slaves… arrayed in warlike manner, that is to say with guns, pistols, knives and other warlike weapons… [to] most wickedly, maliciously, rebelliously and feloniously… make public insurrection.” [12] In fact, the most enduring impact of the escape may well have been to help define the new “slave stampede” metaphor as a form of mobile insurrection.

In the short term, white Kentuckians hoped to set an example with Doyle. A Maysville, Kentucky journalist thought that the “fate of Doyle may teach others… that Kentucky is a dangerous soil for Abolitionist[s] to tread upon.” Following a preliminary hearing on August 17, a grand jury in Fayette County indicted Doyle for enticing slaves and inciting insurrection. Lexington politician, future U.S. vice president, and future Confederate John C. Breckenridge served as Doyle’s defense counsel. To be sure, Breckenridge remained firmly proslavery. Doyle’s conviction was certain, and Breckenridge’s presence as Doyle’s attorney merely reflected Lexington elites’ desire to demonstrate respect for law and order over vigilante violence. Doyle plead guilty on October 9 and Judge Walker Reid sentenced him to 20 years in the state penitentiary, where he died in 1863. [13]

Few abolitionists mourned Doyle’s fate. Just several years earlier, antislavery activists had rallied behind Calvin Fairbanks and Delia Webster, abolitionists who had also been convicted in Kentucky (not for inciting insurrection but rather for helping freedom seekers escape in violation of the state’s slave stealing statutes). But most antislavery newspapers viewed Doyle as an opportunist rather than a committed antislavery activist. An antislavery paper in Ohio sniped that Doyle had been “caught in his own trap” and suspected that if Doyle had succeeded, “his design was to betray them [the freedom seekers] to the kidnappers and secure the reward for their recapture.” In the words of one antislavery editor, “we feel much less pity for him than for the innocent men who trusted him as their friend.” [14] 

Doyle’s conviction was certain, but the fate of the freedom seekers who trusted him was still very much up in the air. Rather than prosecute all the freedom seekers, Bracken County authorities singled out seven alleged ringleaders they believed had helped Doyle orchestrate the stampede: Harry Slaughter (held by Richard Pindell), Shadrack (held by Thomas Christian), Jack (held by politician Cassius M. Clay), Bill Griffin (held by John Chism), Presley Coleman (held by John Wardlow), Anderson (held by Alexander Prewett), and Jasper (held by Samuel R. Bullock). A grand jury indicted the seven men for assault with intent to kill Charles Fowler (the badly wounded posse member) and on insurrection and rebellion charges. Following a three-day trial that spanned from August 30 to September 1, jurors acquitted Jack, Bill Griffin, Anderson, and Jasper on both counts, but convicted Slaughter, Shadrack, and Presley Coleman for conspiracy to insurrection and rebellion. The court sentenced the three enslaved men to hang. [15]

Slaveholders secured gubernatorial pardons for all three condemned men, though the assumption was that the rebellious men who had escaped the gallows would be sold to the Deep South as a warning to other enslaved people. That was the fate that seemed to be in store for Harry Slaughter. After Slaughter received his pardon, his slaveholder Sidney Edmiston moved him from the Bracken County prison to Pullum’s slave pen in Lexington, where he remained for “a month or more.” But Slaughter eventually persuaded Edmiston to allow him to purchase his freedom. “I immediately borrowed the money and married my sweetheart,” Slaughter recalled. The fate of Shadrack, Presley Coleman, and the countless other freedom seekers never charged with crimes but returned directly to their slaveholders remains unclear, though few were likely as fortunate as Slaughter. In December, a Memphis, Tennessee newspaper hinted that most of the recaptured freedom seekers had been sold south as punishment for their participation in the stampede. [16]

As the trials unfolded, Lexington slaveholders gathered to debate what had gone wrong. Two public meetings held at the Court House on Monday, August 14 and Saturday, August 19 debated and recommended multiple proposals to city, county, and state authorities. Lexington slaveholders asked city officials to “organize a force that will suppress the flocking of slaves to the City without such written permissions form their owners,” and outlined a county-sponsored slave patrol to prevent “nocturnal gatherings” such as the one that had precipitated the stampede. Meanwhile, slaveholders suggested that the state legislature both enact new restrictions on free African Americans residing in the state and a new state tax to deter “peddlers and itinerant vendors” from traveling the countryside and having contact with enslaved people. In September, the Fayette County Court acted upon the committee’s recommendation and took steps to create a new patrol by dividing the county into “suitable districts.” [17] 

The Lexington stampede also figured in arguments both for and against gradual emancipation during Kentucky’s 1849-1850 constitutional convention. A Tennessee editor noted with concern that many Kentucky slaveholders already were selling enslaved people farther south, including “when a stampede of 70 or 80 negroes takes place in Kentucky, and are recovered, they are at once handcuffed and sent South.” Later in July 1849, a supporter of gradual emancipation cited the ”slave stampede in Fayette last year” to insist the non-slaveholding whites had a right to weigh in on the future of slavery in the state. “Some 70 or more negroes ran away and passed through portions of three or four large slaveholding counties, and could not be arrested until they got among the non-slaveholders of Bracken county,” he reminded readers. [18]

 

FURTHER READING

The Lexington Atlas provided the most detailed contemporary reports about the escape and pursuit. [19]  Harry Slaughter’s 1897 interview with the New York Sun, which billed him as the “last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection,'” remains the only extant account from a freedom seeker’s perspective. [20]

Scholars have discussed the mass escape attempt, but not in connection with the “stampede” metaphor. Historian J. Winston Coleman used court records to reconstruct the details of the escape in his study, Slavery Times in Kentucky (1940). Herbert Aptheker drew on Coleman’s research and situated the escape as an insurrection in his landmark study, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943). In a pair of articles (1998 and 2000), historian John Leming, jr. concluded that the Lexington episode was the “largest single slave uprising in Kentucky history.” In a 2023 essay entitled “‘This Priceless Jewell––Liberty’: The Doyle Conspiracy of 1848,” historian James Prichard emphasizes Doyle’s dubious past while also expertly documenting the legal fallout from the escape for Doyle and the captured freedom seekers. [21]

 

[1] Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Stampede Among the Negroes,” August 8, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “For the Lexington Atlas,” August 10, 1848; Maysville (KY) Campaign Flag, “The runaway slaves again,” August 18, 1848; Omaha (NE) World-Herald, “Free Negro For 46 Years: Last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection’ Tells of Attempt to Escape,” August 16, 1897; Indictments, Bracken County (KY) Circuit Court, August 29, 1848, typescript copies in box 1, folder 8, J. Winston Coleman papers, University of Kentucky. The Slave Stampedes on the Southern Borderlands project would like to thank James Prichard of Lexington, Kentucky for sharing information from his extensive files and his forthcoming essay on the escape, which will be published in the edited volume Slavery and Freedom in the Bluegrass State (University of Kentucky Press, 2023).

[2] Articles that reference the escape as a stampede include: Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Stampede Among the Negroes,” August 8, 1848; Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, “Stampede Among the Negroes,” August 9, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Abolition–Runaways–Public Meeting–Great Excitement–Threats of Vengeance,” August 10, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, August 11, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “The Runaway Negroes,” August 11, 1848; Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, “Abolition – Runaways – Public Meeting,” August 11, 1848; Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, August 12, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, August 12, 1848; Buffalo (NY) Commercial, “The Kentucky Runaways,” August 14, 1848; Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, “Doyle – The Negro Abductor,” August 14, 1848; New York (NY) Evening Post, “Stampede Among the Negroes,” August 15, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Public Meeting,” August 15, 1848; Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, August 16, 1848; New York (NY) Daily Herald, “Stampede Among the Negroes,” August 16, 1848; Buffalo (NY) Commercial, “The Runaway Slaves,” August 16, 1848; New York (NY) Evening Post, “The Runaway Slaves,” August 18, 1848; Cleveland (OH) Herald, “The Absconding Slaves,” August 19, 1848; Baltimore (MD) Sun, “The Kentucky Slave Stampede,” August 19, 1848; Buffalo (NY) Daily Republic, “Kentucky Run-Away Slaves,” August 19, 1848; Fayette (MO) Boon’s Lick Times, “Stampede Among the Negroes,” August 19, 1848; Pittsburgh (PA) Daily Morning Post,”Doyle, The Negro Abductor,” August 21, 1848; Middlebury (VT) Galaxy, “Slave Stampede in Kentucky,” August 22, 1848; Boston (MA) Weekly Messenger, “The Runaway Slaves,” August 23, 1848; Baltimore (MD) Sun, “Kentucky Slave Stampede,” August 23, 1848; Vidalia (LA) Concordia Intelligencer, “Negro Stampede in Kentucky,” August 26, 1848; New Orleans (LA) Crescent, August 28, 1848; Brooklyn (NY) Evening Star, “The Kentucky Slave Stampede,” September 12, 1848; Boston (MA) Liberator, “The Kentucky Slave Stampede,” September 22, 1848; Hallowell (ME) Maine Cultivator and Hallowell Gazette, “The Kentucky Slave Stampede,” October 14, 1848; Baltimore (MD) Sun, “Conviction of Doyle in Kentucky,” October 17, 1848; Alexandria (VA) Gazette, “Doyle Sentenced in Kentucky,” October 18, 1848; Windsor (VT) Journal, October 20, 1848; Sunbury (PA) American, October 21, 1848; Buffalo (NY) Courier, October 21, 1848; Camden (SC) Weekly Journal, October 25, 1848; New Orleans (LA) Crescent, October 27, 1848; Mobile (AL) Alabama Planter, “Conviction of Doyle in Kentucky,” October 30, 1848; Dubuque (IA) Weekly Miners Express, November 14, 1848; New Lisbon (OH) Anti-Slavery Bugle, “Caught in His Own Trap,” November 17, 1848; Louisville (KY) Daily Democrat, “Slavery Emancipation in Kentucky,” December 7, 1848; Louisville (KY) Examiner, “To the Citizens of Jefferson County,” July 28, 1849.

[3] Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, “Doyle – The Negro Abductor,” August 14, 1848; Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, August 16, 1848; James Prichard, “‘This Priceless Jewell–Liberty!:’ The Doyle Conspiracy of 1848,” lecture at Filson Historical Society, Lexington, KY, recorded July 30, 2021.

[4] Omaha (NE) World-Herald, “Free Negro For 46 Years: Last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection’ Tells of Attempt to Escape,” August 16, 1897.

[5] Indictments, Bracken County (KY) Circuit Court, August 29, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Stampede Among the Negroes,” August 8, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “For the Lexington Atlas,” August 10, 1848.

[6] Lexington (KY) Atlas, “The Runaway Negroes,” August 11, 1848; Omaha (NE) World-Herald, “Free Negro For 46 Years: Last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection’ Tells of Attempt to Escape,” August 16, 1897.

[7] Lexington (KY) Atlas, “The Runaway Negroes,” August 11, 1848

[8] Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Abolition–Runaways–Public Meeting–Great Excitement–Threats of Vengeance,” August 10, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “The Runaway Negroes,” August 11, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, August 12, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, August 15, 1848; Maysville (KY) Campaign Flag, “The runaway slaves again,” August 18, 1848. Slaughter recalled that Doyle “left us early in the day” but was most likely referring to Tuesday. See Omaha (NE) World-Herald, “Free Negro For 46 Years: Last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection’ Tells of Attempt to Escape,” August 16, 1897.

[9] Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Abolition–Runaways–Public Meeting–Great Excitement–Threats of Vengeance,” August 10, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “The Runaway Negroes,” August 11, 1848; Maysville (KY) Campaign Flag, “The runaway slaves again,” August 18, 1848.

[10] Omaha (NE) World-Herald, “Free Negro For 46 Years: Last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection’ Tells of Attempt to Escape,” August 16, 1897; Lexington (KY) Atlas, August 10, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Abolition–Runaways–Public Meeting–Great Excitement–Threats of Vengeance,” August 10, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “The Runaway Negroes,” August 11, 1848; Lewis Collins, History of Kentucky (Covington, KY: Collins, 1874), 2:57.

[11] Lexington (KY) Atlas, “The Runaway Negroes,” August 11, 1848; Maysville (KY) Campaign Flag, “The runaway slaves again,” August 18, 1848.

[12] Omaha (NE) World-Herald, “Free Negro For 46 Years: Last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection’ Tells of Attempt to Escape,” August 16, 1897; Indictments, Bracken County (KY) Circuit Court, August 29, 1848.

[13] Maysville (KY) Campaign Flag, “The runaway slaves again,” August 18, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, August 18, 1848; Indictments, Bracken County (KY) Circuit Court, August 29, 1848. For more on Doyle’s trial, see Prichard, “‘This Priceless Jewell–Liberty!:’ The Doyle Conspiracy of 1848,” lecture at Filson Historical Society, Lexington, KY, recorded July 30, 2021.

[14] New Lisbon (OH) Anti-Slavery Bugle, “Caught in His Own Trap,” November 17, 1848; Philadelphia (PA) Freeman, “A Martyr, Or A Judas?,” December 21, 1848.

[15] Indictments, Bracken County (KY) Circuit Court, August 29, 1848; Prichard, “‘This Priceless Jewell–Liberty!:’ The Doyle Conspiracy of 1848,” lecture at Filson Historical Society, Lexington, KY, recorded July 30, 2021.

[16] Omaha (NE) World-Herald, “Free Negro For 46 Years: Last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection’ Tells of Attempt to Escape,” August 16, 1897. On the pardons, see Prichard, “‘This Priceless Jewell–Liberty!:’ The Doyle Conspiracy of 1848,” lecture at Filson Historical Society, Lexington, KY, recorded July 30, 2021. In the context of debates about gradual emancipation and the future of slavery in Kentucky, the Louisville Democrat commented: “Already, when a stampede of 70 or 80 negroes takes place in Kentucky, and are recovered, they are at once handcuffed and sent South.” See Memphis (TN) Herald, quoted in Louisville (KY) Daily Democrat, “Slavery Emancipation in Kentucky,” December 7, 1848.

[17] Lexington (KY) Atlas, “For the Lexington Atlas,” August 10, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “For the Lexington Atlas,” August 11, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, August 10, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Public Meeting,” August 15, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Meeting in Fayette,” August 21, 1848; J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 95-96. Lexington slaveholders even suggested that county courts be allowed to offer rewards for detecting white Underground Railroad agents.

[18] Memphis (TN) Herald, quoted in Louisville (KY) Daily Democrat, “Slavery Emancipation in Kentucky,” December 7, 1848; Louisville (KY) Examiner, “To the Citizens of Jefferson County,” July 28, 1849.

[19] Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Stampede Among the Negroes,” August 8, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “Abolition–Runaways–Public Meeting–Great Excitement–Threats of Vengeance,” August 10, 1848; Lexington (KY) Atlas, “The Runaway Negroes,” August 11, 1848.

[20] Omaha (NE) World-Herald, “Free Negro For 46 Years: Last survivor of the 1848 ‘Insurrection’ Tells of Attempt to Escape,” August 16, 1897.

[21] Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky, 88-92; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 338;John Leming, jr., “Bracken County and The Great Slave Escape of 1848,” Northern Kentucky Heritage 5, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1998): 32-38; Leming, “The Great Slave Escape of 1848 Ended in Bracken County,” The Kentucky Explorer (June 2000): 25-29; James M. Prichard, “‘This Priceless Jewell––Liberty’: The Doyle Conspiracy of 1848,” in Gerald Smith (ed.), Slavery and Freedom in the Bluegrass State: (Re)-visiting My Old Kentucky Home (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2023), 79-109.

DATELINE: OCTOBER 19, 1856, NEAR HANNIBAL, MO

Late on Sunday night, October 19, Reverend Isaac McDaniel, a free and widely traveled African American preacher, stole a horse and carriage, and then “stole” his family and friends from Hannibal slaveholder John Bush. With McDaniel at the helm, the wagon carrying an enslaved man, two enslaved women, and three young enslaved children bounded out of Missouri and into Illinois. Railing against this latest “stampede,” Missouri’s proslavery presses called not for heightened surveillance of the enslaved population, but rather for even stricter control over the state’s free African American residents. As slaveholding authorities had long feared, McDaniel and other mobile free Black Missourians forged antislavery networks across state lines that helped facilitate group escapes. [1]

 

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

Initial reports from two Marion County newspapers, the Hannibal National Democrat and Palmyra Whig, described the escape as a “stampede.” The latter report was reprinted by the St. Louis Missouri Republican. Across the river in Illinois, the Quincy Whig situated the “Negro Stampede” as yet another of “those stampedes” from Marion County that had become frequent during the mid-1850s. [2]

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

Like other free African Americans in Missouri, Isaac McDaniel lived under the state’s repressive Black codes. Well aware that free Black communities aided freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad, slaveholders had tightened the state’s Black codes beginning in the 1830s to counteract growing antislavery sentiment in the North and mounting escapes. In 1835, Missouri legislators required free Blacks who wanted to remain in the state to register for freedom licenses with county clerks. Then in 1843, proslavery lawmakers passed even harsher legislation to “more effectually… prevent free persons of color from entering this State.” The new law forced free Blacks to post a bond ranging from $100 to $1,000 to vouch for their “good behavior,” and also provide “one or more securities,” usually in the form of white neighbors who would serve as character references and occasionally put their own money on the line. [3]

Not much is known about Isaac McDaniel, except that by the early 1850s he had obtained his freedom license and secured the trust of enough white neighbors to put up a bond for his “good behavior,” joining a small free Black community in Marion County that numbered only 76 people in 1850. McDaniel established himself as a Methodist preacher, canvasing Marion County and preaching to enslaved laborers. Importantly, as he spread the gospel, McDaniel also came into close contact with enslaved Missourians across the northeastern corner of the state. [4]

Freedom license in hand, McDaniel started traveling extensively throughout the North. Reports placed the itinerant preacher in Cincinnati and Chicago, both home to sizable free Black communities that were defying the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and continuing to assist freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. According to one source, McDaniel also visited Canada West (modern day Ontario), home to many freedom seekers who had fled the United States.  [5]

But McDaniel kept coming back to Missouri, despite its severe Black codes. That was because his wife, 32-year-old Mary, and their five-year-old son, Daniel, were enslaved by John Bush at his farm about four miles northwest of Hannibal, along the road to Palmyra. The 57-year-old Bush was a well-to-do slaveholder who held five people in bondage at the time of the 1850 census, including another family––32-year-old Anthony, his wife, 34-year-old Eliza, and their children, eight-year-old Margaret and six-year-old Lewis. With the addition of Isaac and Mary’s son Daniel sometime in 1850 or 1851, Bush enslaved at least six people by October 1856. Negotiating with his wife’s slaveholder, McDaniel arranged to purchase their freedom with money he had saved up during his travels. The date was set for Tuesday, October 21, when McDaniel would buy his wife and child out of slavery. [6]

The money never changed hands. McDaniel may never have intended to pay Bush, using the agreement as an excuse to keep visiting Mary and Daniel, or to forestall a potential sale to the Deep South slave markets. Or perhaps the other family Bush enslaved might have pleaded with McDaniel not to leave them behind. Either way, on Sunday night, October 19, McDaniel crept into Bush’s stable, took his horse and carriage, and helped six people exit slavery––his own wife and son, and Anthony, Eliza, and their two children, Margaret and Lewis. [7]

 

AFTERMATH

When slaveholder John Bush awoke to find his six enslaved people missing, he frantically offered up a reward of $600 dollars for their recapture, which he later raised to $1,000. The horse and carriage were eventually recovered, but McDaniel and the six freedom seekers were long gone. Given McDaniel’s extensive contacts in Illinois, the editor of the Palmyra Whig concluded that there was “no doubt” that the two families were well on their way to Canada. The ultimate fate of McDaniel and the two families remains unclear, though no reports exist to suggest the freedom seekers were ever recaptured. [8]

 

McDaniel’s involvement led many local slaveholders to conclude that the state’s oppressive Black codes were not tough enough. The Palmyra Whig decried the “great danger and extreme foolishness” of allowing free Blacks “in the disguise of preachers, to perambulate the country at will,” and urged even stricter measures to control the mobility of free Black Missourians. The focus on blaming free Blacks marked a noticeable shift from earlier efforts to explain away stampedes as the work of white Northerners. After 11 freedom seekers escaped from near Palmyra in 1853, slaveholders accused their Illinois neighbors of “enticing” enslaved people to escape and even read a white Methodist preacher out of the county because of his antislavery views. It had become slaveholders’ “usual” explanation, observed the Quincy, Illinois Whig, whenever “negroes run away from their master, in Marion county, to accuse citizens of Quincy with running them off.” [9]

But as escapes continued at a steady clip throughout the mid-1850s, Missouri slaveholders looked not just to outside actors, but placed increased scrutiny on the activities of free Blacks working to undermine slavery from within. (Just two years earlier, St. Louis police arrested another itinerant free Black preacher, Hiram Revels, for being in the state without a license. And even more recently in May 1855, authorities thwarted an attempted stampede organized by free Blacks in St. Louis.) Thomas Anderson, the local politician who in 1853 proposed that Missourians “suspend all business and intercourse” with Illinois residents, now focused his wrath on Missouri’s free African American populace, offering up a $1,000 reward of his own for the capture of Isaac McDaniel. [10] Ultimately, the 1856 Hannibal Stampede may not have resulted in the stricter Black codes local slaveholders were clamoring for, but it was part of a broader shift in the attitudes of slaveholders and authorities across Missouri, who regarded free Black populations with increasing suspicion and hostility.

 

FURTHER READING

Most of the details about McDaniel’s life, which are admittedly sparse, come from scattered references in reports in the Hannibal National Democrat and Palmyra Whig. Both accounts were authored by proslavery editors who had nothing but contempt for McDaniel and other free Blacks, but each provides valuable, albeit brief glimpses into McDaniel’s extensive travels and  connections across the Missouri-Illinois borderlands. [11]

There is also uncertainty about the identities of the two freedom seeking families. The Hannibal National Democrat published the names of all the freedom seekers, including two mothers, but did not specify which woman–Mary or Eliza–was married to McDaniel. It was most likely Mary, because the paper appeared to list the freedom seekers as family units, and Anthony, Eliza, and their two children were grouped together, with Mary and Daniel afterwards. Census records help corroborate some of the details about the freedom seekers, but also raise additional questions. Starting in 1850, Congress instructed census takers to record the ages and gender of enslaved people, but not to take down the names of those enslaved people, deeming their names to be “no useful information.” Based on the names and ages reported by the Hannibal National Democrat, Anthony, Eliza, and Margaret appear to be three of the five enslaved people Bush held as of the 1850 Census. At the time of the census, Eliza was likely pregnant with Lewis, and Mary pregnant with Daniel. But two other enslaved people who appear on the 1850 Census, a 20-year-old Black male and 10-year-old Black female, do not match any of the known freedom seekers, making it possible that Bush enslaved as many as eight people in 1856. [12]

To this point, scholars have not directly addressed the 1856 Hannibal Stampede. Still, Richard Blackett’s The Captive’s Quest for Freedom (2018) offers useful context by demonstrating how the subversive activities of free Black Missourians struck a nerve with slaveholders during the 1850s. Similarly, Kristen Epps’s Slavery on the Periphery (2016) highlights the centrality of slave mobility to slavery’s spread–and undoing–in western Missouri. Around the same time as slaveholders in western Missouri grew concerned about the mobility of enslaved people, enslavers in northeastern Missouri were becoming more wary of mobile free Blacks like Isaac McDaniel. [13]

 

ADDITIONAL IMAGES

 

[1] “Negro Stampede,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 23, 1856, [WEB]; “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856, [WEB].

[2] “Negro Stampede,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 23, 1856; “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856; “Another Stampede,” St. Louis, MO Republican, October 28, 1856; “Negro Stampede,” Quincy, IL Whig, November 1, 1856.

[3] Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri, 1840 (St. Louis: Chambers, Knapp, and Co., 1840), 413-417, [WEB]; Laws of the State of Missouri, Passed at the First Session of the Twelfth General Assembly (Jefferson City, MO: Allen Hammond, 1843), 66-68, [WEB]; Harrison Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 1804-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1914), 67-70, [WEB]. Some scholars have conflated the two laws, and mistakenly claimed that the 1835 statute required a bond, when the requirement of a bond was not in the original 1835 law, but added by its 1843 successor. See Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Antonio F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1980), 64, [WEB]; Kristen Epps, Slavery on the Perihpery: the Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 81-82. For the best account on freedom licenses in eastern Missouri, see Ebony Jenkins, “Freedom Licenses in St. Louis City and County, 1835-1865,” NPS, [WEB].

[4] “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856, [WEB]. It is unclear if McDaniel was ever enslaved or born free. The Palmyra Whig alluded to the fact that McDaniel “succeeded a few years since in getting control of his own actions,” but this appears to be in reference to obtaining a freedom license and securities to vouch for his conduct. On the free Black population of Marion County, see Seventh Census of the United States (Washington: Robert Armstrong, 1853), 655, [WEB]. Reports all agreed in their identification of McDaniel as an itinerant Methodist preacher, but besides these brief mentions no other available records shed light on his religious work.

[5] The Palmyra Whig mentions McDaniel’s reported trips to Canada. The Hannibal National Democrat only mentions that McDaniel was “well known” in Illinois, Cincinnati and “other points in Ohio.” See “Negro Stampede,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 23, 1856, [WEB]; “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856, [WEB].

[6] “Negro Stampede,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 23, 1856, [WEB]; “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856, [WEB]; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Miller Township, Marion County, MO, Ancestry; 1850 U.S. Census, Miller Township, Marion County, MO, Family 522, Ancestry; Find A Grave, [WEB]. For the location of slaveholder John Bush’s farm, see “Big and Curious Radish,” Hannibal, MO Messenger, November 1, 1859.

[7] “Negro Stampede,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 23, 1856, [WEB]; “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856, [WEB].

[8] “Not Yet Caught,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 30, 1856; “Negro Stampede,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 23, 1856, [WEB]; “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856, [WEB].

[9] “Negro Stampede,” Quincy, IL Whig, November 1, 1856, [WEB];  “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856, [WEB]. During the winter of 1853-1854, some local slaveholders did blame free Blacks for the rising number of group escapes, but their comments were largely drowned out by accusations leveled against white Illinois residents. See “Marion Association,” Palmyra, MO Whig, January 5, 1854; “Complaints of the People,” and “Marion Association,” Hannibal, MO Courier, January 12, 1854. Also see the post on the 1853 Palmyra Stampede.

[10] “Not Yet Caught,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 30, 1856. On Anderson’s earlier attempt to embargo Illinois, see see “Speech of Thomas L. Anderson, Esq.,” Quincy, IL Whig, February 6, 1854.

[11] “Negro Stampede,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 23, 1856, [WEB]; “Another Stampede,” Palmyra, MO Whig, October 23, 1856, [WEB].

[12] “Negro Stampede,” Hannibal, MO National Democrat, October 23, 1856, [WEB]; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Miller Township, Marion County, MO, Ancestry. By 1860, Bush enslaved one person, a 18-year-old Black female, who does not match any of the known freedom seekers or the five individuals enumerated in the 1850 census. See 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Miller Township, Marion County, MO, Ancestry. On the debates over including enslaved people’s names in the census, see Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st. sess, 672, [WEB]. North Carolina senator George Badger mocked, “What do you want of such names as Big Cuff and Little Cuff?”

[13] Richard Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018),142-145, see post; Epps, Slavery on the Periphery, see post.

PRINTABLE NARRATIVE

DATELINE: NOVEMBER 7, 1861, SPRINGFIELD, MO

Union soldiers of the 24th Indiana Infantry cheered and sang songs as they gathered outside the headquarters of Brig. Gen. James H. Lane. It was around 9 pm on Thursday night, November 7, 1861 and the Hoosiers clamored for a speech from “Jim Lane, the Liberator,” a sitting U.S. senator, outspoken anti-slavery Republican, and commander of the Kansas Brigade. Emerging in civilian garb, Lane got right to the point. The war was about slavery, and it was high time the Union army stopped returning freedom seekers, even to loyal slaveholders in border states like Missouri. “Let us be bold––inscribe ‘freedom to all’ upon our banners.” Should the federal government order him to return freedom seekers, Lane declared to “thundering applause” that he would “break his sword and quit the field.” [1]

Reporters picked up Lane’s speech, but so too did enslaved African Americans living near Springfield, a vital crossroads in southwestern Missouri. The following night, Friday, November 8, “as if by preconcerted movement,” more than 150 enslaved Missourians escaped into Lane’s camp in a “great stampede.” Men, women, young children, and “whole families” found refuge with the Kansas Brigade. And when Unionist slaveholders came looking for them the next day, Lane kept his word. A reporter on the scene had “not yet heard of an instance in which one has been found.” [2] Another ten months would elapse before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which famously exempted loyal states such as Missouri. But early in the war enslaved Missourians were already seizing opportunities to “stampede” into Union lines, where they found growing numbers of northern soldiers willing to help them claim freedom.

 

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

James Lane invoked the term “stampede” in his November 7 speech, arguing that it was not the Union army’s duty to “prevent [Confederates’] slaves from stampeding.” His remarks were widely reprinted by northern papers urging the adoption of more aggressive anti-slavery policies. [3] Days later, correspondents for two major New York serials, the Tribune and World, described the “great stampede” or “regular stampede” that followed on Friday night, November 8. [4]

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

By the fall of 1861, a Union army under Maj. Gen. John C.  Fremont had moved into southwestern Missouri in an effort to clear the state of Confederate forces. In late October, Fremont’s men drove Confederates out of Springfield in Greene county and set up camp nearby. Though controversy and uncertainty over federal emancipation policy dogged Fremont’s advance. Back on August 30, the Republican politician turned Union general had made headlines by declaring martial law across the state and emancipating all enslaved people held by disloyal slaveholders. Within days, President Lincoln ordered Fremont to modify his order to conform with congressional confiscation policies. Thus it was uncertain what the Union army’s presence would mean for slavery in southwestern Missouri. Some white residents actually welcomed the columns of Union soldiers streaming into the region. Many slaveholders even avowed their loyalty, looking to the U.S. government as their best chance of protecting slavery. [5]

Though the area’s enslaved populace had good reason to welcome Lane’s brigade. The three Kansas regiments had literally blazed a path through western Missouri to link up with Fremont’s forces at Springfield, burning the town of Osceola, Missouri on September 23. Its ranks were filled with men who had lived through Bleeding Kansas during the 1850s, a period of violent conflict to determine whether Kansas would be admitted as a free or slave state. The brigade’s anti-slavery leanings were so well known that some started referring to the outfit as the “Jayhawkers,” a name given to free-state settlers during the earlier contest. And its commander also had solid anti-slavery credentials. Earlier that summer, Lane declared on the senate floor that “the institution of slavery will not survive, in any State of this Union, the march of the Union armies.” He even predicted that enslaved southerners would “get up an insurrection” as U.S. forces approached. [6]

Not only was he a vocal opponent of slavery, but Senator Lane played a key role in crafting early federal policy about how to treat freedom seekers who entered Union lines. In August 1861, Lane and fellow congressional Republicans passed the First Confiscation Act, which authorized Union forces to seize (and presumably liberate) enslaved people whose labor was being used to aid the Confederacy. This included enslaved southerners forced to labor on Confederate fortifications and work as teamsters, body servants, or cooks for Confederate troops. But when word of the law’s provisions got out, virtually all enslaved people who ran to Union lines claimed they had been coerced into providing manual labor for the Confederate government. How could Union officers sort out who had actually been forced to work for the Confederates and who had not? It was next to impossible. So on August 8, the U.S. War Department instructed commanders in the field to accept all enslaved people seeking refuge behind Union lines, keeping careful track so that loyal slaveholders could file claims later for compensation. As the historian James Oakes observes, these instructions “effectively extended the reach of the First Confiscation Act far beyond its technical limits.” [7]

Still Lane felt that federal policy did not go far enough. In early October, he grumbled that Union soldiers were protecting the plantations of the very Missouri slaveholders who had taken up “arms against the Government.” Many of his men felt the same way. Although the First Confiscation Act was a milestone, Lane and his Kansans saw it as “a weak gesture where a vigorous blow was needed,” writes the historian Chandra Manning, because it “targeted the rights of select individuals without dislodging the institution of slavery.” Lane thought “our policy in this regard should be changed,” and was not shy about expressing his point of view. [8] Although Lane’s Kansans were among the last Union troops to arrive at Springfield in late October 1861, they were at the leading edge of federal emancipation policy.

That point was made abundantly clear on Wednesday, October 30, when Lane’s three Kansas regiments arrived in Springfield to join Fremont’s larger Union force. One of Fremont’s staffers witnessed the brigade’s “motley procession” through town, with Lane at its head and about 200 African Americans following close behind, many mounted on horseback. Most had peeled off from plantations and farms in western Missouri and joined Lane’s brigade as it headed to Springfield. They quickly found work as laborers and servants, receiving wages from the government directly or from the pockets of officers and enlisted men who hired freedom seekers as personal cooks. Just as importantly, these freedom seekers would have an enormous impact on the future of slavery near Springfield. [9]

Scores of newly-freed black Missourians fanned out from Lane’s camp near Springfield over the ensuing days, alerting the local enslaved population that the Kansans were friendly to their cause. “Our colored teamsters and servants act as so many missionaries among their brethren,” wrote Chaplain H.H. Moore of the Third Kansas Infantry, “and induce a great many to come into camp.” Enslaved Missourians already behind Union lines “have become a sort of Vigilance Committee to secure the freedom of the slaves in our neighborhood,” one of Fremont’s staffers logged in his journal, referencing the black-led anti-slavery organizations that formed the backbone of the Underground Railroad before the war. Even a correspondent for the New York World marveled that “the agency of the negro servants in the army is all the machinery necessary to cause a regular stampede.” [10]

A pivotal event that helped trigger the stampede came on Thursday night, November 7, about a week into the brigade’s stay near Springfield. Soldiers congregated outside of Lane’s headquarters in the home of Major Daniel Dorsey Berry, a wealthy, pro-Confederate planter who had fled to his Mississippi plantation when Union forces approached. Berry left behind his wife Olivia and several daughters to keep watch over the family’s Springfield home and five enslaved people, while his son was off fighting for the Confederacy. From the slaveholding Berrys’ balcony, the Union general recited his support for a more aggressive emancipation policy. The US army, he told the assembled Hoosier soldiers, could not “crush the rebels” and at the same time “keep their slaves from stampeding.” That would require two armies––first a “treason crushing army” that would defeat Confederates and restore the Union, and a second “slavery restoring army” that would follow “about ten miles in the rear.” Lane remarked that he wanted to “let slavery take care of itself”––a misleading claim at best, since his soldiers were actively helping freedom seekers and Lane himself was privately reminding fellow officers of his earlier prediction that slavery “would perish with the march of the Federal armies.” [11]

The “great stampede” of more than 150 African Americans occurred the next evening, on November 8. But on the night of Lane’s speech five enslaved people escaped from the Berry household, within earshot of the Union general and undoubtedly encouraged by the tone of his remarks. Rumor among Union soldiers had it that Lane personally encouraged their escape. “When Lane left Springfield he actually had his men steal… two negroes from that family,” one Union soldier wrote home, having heard that “five of his men were caught… packing these negroes and their traps in a wagon to convey them away.” Whether Lane directly or indirectly encouraged the people enslaved by the Berry family to escape, his hosts had had enough. Olivia Berry and her daughters, despite their likely Confederate sympathies, had stepped outside to listen to Lane’s speech. When they returned later that evening, they were “astounded to find that all the negroes in the family had embraced the opportunity afforded by their brief absence to run away!” The next morning the women fumed at “the melancholy necessity of preparing their own breakfast.” Furious at their uninvited guest, the Berry women refused to serve Lane breakfast the following morning. [12]

The mass escape that occurred on Friday night, November 8, was probably motivated as much by Lane’s speech as the imminent withdrawal of Union troops from Springfield. On November 2, President Lincoln had replaced General Fremont with Maj. Gen. David Hunter. In the same stroke, Lincoln advised Hunter to withdraw from his advanced position at Springfield and divide his force between Sedalia, located more than 110 miles to the north, and Rolla, Missouri, some 100 miles to the northeast. As part of the plan, Lane’s brigade was set to return to Kansas. Many enslaved Missourians must have realized that time was running out to claim their freedom. Lane’s Kansans would leave Springfield the next day, Saturday, November 9. [13]

Before Lane’s brigade decamped from Springfield, slaveholders arrived in large numbers and scoured the camp for the freedom seekers. Many of the enslavers identified as Unionists and anticipated that their vows of loyalty would establish their right to re-enslave freedom seekers. Diplomatically, Lane towed the official line, insisting that “my brigade is not here for the purpose of interfering in anywise with the institution of slavery.” His soldiers would “not become negro thieves nor shall they be prostituted into negro-catchers.” He invited slaveholders to “find your slave; if he is in my camp you can take him, if he is willing to go.” But few enslaved people would willingly reenter captivity, and soldiers collaborated with freedom seekers to conceal and protect them from forcible recapture. As Chaplain Moore of the Third Kansas wrote, “it cannot be denied that some of our officers and soldiers take great delight” in aiding freedom seekers, “and that by personal effort and otherwise, they do much towards carrying it on.” Reports suggested that none of the freedom seekers were recaptured. [14] 

 

AFTERMATH

An estimated 150 enslaved Missourians from Springfield marched out of town with Lane’s brigade on November 9. However, the large number of freedom seekers quickly strained the brigade’s rations. On November 12, near Lamar, Missouri, Lane detailed three regimental chaplains, H.H. Moore of the Third Kansas, Reeder Fish of the Fourth Kansas, and Hugh Dunn Fisher of the Fifth Kansas, to take command of the freedom seekers and escort them to Fort Scott, Kansas. Not only were they to provide a safe conduit armed with just a “load of old muskets” and no ammunition, but the three chaplains were to “superintend the entire business of seeing them located” upon arriving on free soil in Kansas. Moore’s headcount enumerated 218 enslaved Missourians in a wagon train that spanned over a mile in length. The vast majority of these men, women, and children had fled from near Springfield. Some clung tightly to “a large amount of household furniture” they had taken during their flight. And they were clearly anxious to leave Missouri. During one brief stop, an enslaved woman approached Chaplain Moore and gently prodded him to keep the column moving. “Day is breaking, see,” she said, gesturing to the east. [15]

The so-called “Black Brigade” crossed into Kansas on Wednesday, November 13. Chaplains Moore and Fisher portrayed the arrival in biblical terms. Moore likened “the cheers and shouts” the freedom seekers let loose upon crossing into Kansas to “the shouts of Israel after the passage of the Red Sea.” It was, he declared with no lack of hubris, “the most remarkable exodus of slaves to a land of freedom, that has occurred since the time of Moses.” Once in Kansas, the three chaplains hired out freedom seekers to Kanas farmers willing to pay them wages. “Thus far they have been taken care of,” wrote one Kansan, “as the farmers needed help and hundreds if not thousands are now employed in harvesting.” But he worried that after harvest many of the freedom seekers would find themselves out of work and overwhelm the antislavery stronghold of Lawrence. “There is not an intelligent slave in Mo., but knows where Lawrence is and we shall have them here by thousands,” he wrote, pleading for donations from eastern abolitionists to help feed and clothe the freedom seekers over the winter. [16]

They also gave the freedom seekers new names. “We changed their names from the old plantation names to those of Northern significancy,” attested Fisher, who claimed it was “to prevent the possibility of their being returned to slavery.” Moore recalled renaming one enslaved man who went by Daniel Bonham. Bonham was the surname of his slaveholder, so Moore renamed him Daniel Webster on the spot. Similarly, Moore renamed another family of freedom seekers Fisher, as a tribute to his fellow chaplain. What the freedom seekers thought of this practice is hard to determine, though they may not have appreciated the white soldiers arbitrarily assigning them new names. [17]

The column’s arrival elicited considerable attention from Kansas newspapers, which connected it to the larger debate over a more aggressive federal emancipation policy. Editors wryly observed that the Kansas soldiers’ “favorite pastime is raking the n––rs as they go.” Although “we never fancied the idea of having free negroes colonized among us,” one white Kansan took solace in the fact that “wherever our armies march… they will leave the traitors n––rless.” [18]

Back in Springfield, slaveholding Unionists chafed that Federal forces had abandoned the town even as they groaned loudly about the flight of freedom seekers to Lane’s brigade. Within days Confederate forces under Brig. Gen. Benjamin McCulloch recaptured Springfield. A committee of Unionists from southwestern Missouri appealed to the Union high command to return Federal troops to the vicinity. Although McCulloch withdrew to Arkansas after a few days, they claimed that 3,000 to 5,000 loyal white Missourians had been forced to flee their homes, fearing retribution from Confederates. McCulloch, however, picked up on growing tensions within the region’s Unionist populace during his brief stay in Springfield. Federal forces had “greatly injured their cause by taking negroes belonging to Union men,” McCulloch eagerly reported back to Richmond. [19]

Some of the freedom seekers who joined Lane’s column went on to play a critical role in the Union war effort. David Ware may not have been in Springfield to hear Lane’s speech on November 7, but he was among those who followed the Kansas chaplains to freedom. Ware had been born into slavery in Cooper county, Missouri in 1839, and by 1861 he was enslaved near Greenfield, some 40 miles northwest of Springfield. Aged 22, Ware was married and father to a two-year-old child. But his wife and child were forced by their slaveholder to relocate to Springfield. She escaped from there in September, making her way on foot back to Greenfield. Reunited, in November the family linked up with the column of freedom seekers guided by Chaplains Moore, Fish, and Fisher and journeyed to Kansas. Ware served in the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry, and upon discharge went to work as a janitor at the Kansas state capitol until his death in 1888. [20]

 

FURTHER READING

The most detailed accounts of the Springfield stampede were penned by correspondents of the New York Tribune and World. [21] Numerous reports of the so-called “Black Brigade” and its march from Springfield were recorded in Kansas papers afterwards. The two leading eyewitness accounts of the expedition were composed by Chaplains Moore and Fisher. Days after arriving in Kansas, Moore wrote a letter to the Lawrence Republican, and decades later Fisher authored a memoir in which he detailed the column’s movement through western Missouri. [22]

Historians have largely overlooked the specifics of the November 8 stampede, though several scholars have explored the resulting movement of freedom seekers to Kansas. Bryce Benedict’s history of the Kansas Brigade, Jayhawkers (2009), briefly notes that Lane’s brigade had become “a magnet” for freedom seekers while near Springfield, before recounting the return trip to Kansas based upon Moore and Fisher’s accounts. Ian Michael Spurgeon also references the movement of freedom seekers from Springfield to Kansas in his study of Kansas’s U.S. Colored Troops. Kristen Epps highlights the episode as part of a broader trend of military chaplains assuming “an active role in shepherding contrabands to safety.” [23]

Other works help contextualize the status of slavery in the loyal border states during the war’s first year. Chandra Manning places the Union rank-and-file at the vanguard of emancipationist sentiment in her book What This Cruel War Was Over (2007). She argues that between August-December 1861, Union soldiers came to see slavery as a stumbling block to winning the war, and “championed the destruction of slavery a full year ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation, well before most civilians, political leaders, or officers.” Although she does not describe the Springfield stampede, Manning notes that Lane’s brigade “paid no attention to official distinctions drawn by the First Confiscation Act, and instead actively liberated slaves and intimidated their owners” along its path through western Missouri. In Freedom National (2013), James Oakes takes stock of Union soldiers who “were clearly cooperating with the slaves” in loyal border states, but stresses the role of Republican policymakers in promulgating anti-slavery policies that they believed would chip away at slavery, even in regions that had remained in the Union. [24]

 

ADDITIONAL IMAGES

 

[1] “Jim Lane’s Speech at Springfield, Missouri,” Junction City, KS Smoky Hill and Republican Union, November 28, 1861; “Gen. Lane at Springfield, Mo.,” Washington, D.C. National Republican, November 30, 1861, [WEB].

[2] “Important from Missouri,” New York Tribune, November 18, 1861; “From Gen. Hunter’s Command,” New York World, November 19, 1861.

[3] “Jim Lane’s Speech at Springfield, Missouri,” Junction City, KS Smoky Hill and Republican Union, November 28, 1861; “Gen. Lane at Springfield, Mo.,” Washington, D.C. National Republican, November 30, 1861, [WEB]; “The War and Slavery,” Springfield, MA Republican, November 13, 1861; “Speech of Gen. Lane,” Boston Liberator, November 29, 1861.

[4] “Important from Missouri,” New York Tribune, November 18, 1861; “Gen. Lane and His Solution of the Negro Question,” New York World, November 19, 1861.

[5] Allan Nevins, Fremont: Pathmarker of the West (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1939, rpt. 1955), 550, 657; On Fremont’s August 30 order, see James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 156-159.

[6] Bryce Benedict, Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade of James H. Lane (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009); Lane quoted in Oakes, Freedom National, 116, 196.

[7] Oakes, Freedom National, 122-139.

[8] The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), series 2, vol. 1, 771-772, [WEB]; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 46.

[9] [William Dorsheimer], “Fremont’s Hundred Days in Missouri, III,” Atlantic Monthly 9:53 (March 1862): 377, [WEB]. The staffer was William Dorsheimer. For identification as the author, see Benedict, Jayhawkers, 129.

[10]  H.H. Moore to Friend Speer, November 19, 1861, in “The Black Brigade,” Lawrence, KS Republican, November 21, 1861; Dorsheimer], “Fremont’s Hundred Days in Missouri, III,” 377, [WEB]; “From Gen. Hunter’s Command,” New York World, November 19, 1861.

[11] Official Records, series 2, vol. 1, 772, [WEB]; Benedict, Jayhawkers, 293, n10; 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Campbell Township, Greene County, MO, Ancestry; “Major D.D. Berry, Veteran of Many Battles, Succumbs,” Springfield, MO News-Leader, March 23, 1915; “Jim Lane’s Speech at Springfield, Missouri,” Junction City, KS Smoky Hill and Republican Union, November 28, 1861; “Gen. Lane at Springfield, Mo.,” Washington, D.C. National Republican, November 30, 1861, [WEB].

[12] H.H. Moore diary entries for November 7-8, 1861, quoted in Benedict, Jayhawkers, 293, n10. On rumors that Lane may have encouraged the Berry family’s enslaved people to run away, see EC. Hubbard to Dear Brother, January 18, 1862, E.C. Hubbard Letters, Chicago History Museum.

[13] Nevins, Fremont, 657; Benedict, Jayhawkers, 156.

[14] Official Records, series 2, vol. 1, 772, [WEB]; H.H. Moore to Friend Speer, November 19, 1861, in “The Black Brigade,” Lawrence, KS Republican, November 21, 1861; Oakes, Freedom National, 169, 176-177; “Important from Missouri,” New York Tribune, November 18, 1861; “From Gen. Hunter’s Command,” New York World, November 19, 1861.

[15] Moore to Friend Speer, November 19, 1861, in “The Black Brigade,” Lawrence, KS Republican, November 21, 1861. The estimate of 150 who fled near Springfield comes from the correspondent for the New York World. His figure pertained to Friday night alone. In total, he claimed that about 500 enslaved people had joined Lane’s column since it entered Missouri earlier that fall. See “From Gen. Hunter’s Command,” New York World, November 19, 1861. Note that the wagon train of 218 freedom seekers were not all the black Missourians who had joined Lane’s brigade. Many freedom seekers stayed in the ranks and were employed as cooks and body servants by officers, messes, and individual soldiers, or as laborers on the federal government’s dime. 

[16] John B. Wood to George L. Stearns, November 19, 1861, Kansas State Historical Society, available online through Civil War on the Western Border, Missouri Digital Heritage, [WEB]; Hugh Dunn Fisher, The Gun and the Gospel: Early Kansas and Chaplain Fisher (Chicago and New York: Medical Century Company, 1899), 166-168, [WEB]; Moore to Friend Speer, November 19, 1861, in “The Black Brigade,” Lawrence, KS Republican, November 21, 1861; “The Black Brigade,” Lawrence, KS Republican, November 21, 1861.

[17] Fisher, The Gun and the Gospel, 166-168, [WEB]; Moore to Friend Speer, November 19, 1861, in “The Black Brigade,” Lawrence, KS Republican, November 21, 1861.

[18] White Cloud, KS Chief, November 28, 1861; Junction City, KS Smoky Hill and Republican Union, November 28, 1861.

[19] Official Records, series 1, vol. 8, 370-371, 686, [WEB].

[20] “David Ware,” Topeka, KS Daily Commonwealth, September 11, 1888.

[21] “Important from Missouri,” New York Tribune, November 18, 1861; “From Gen. Hunter’s Command,” New York World, November 19, 1861.

[22] Moore to Friend Speer, November 19, 1861, in “The Black Brigade,” Lawrence, KS Republican, November 21, 1861; Fisher, The Gun and the Gospel, 166-168, [WEB].

[23] Benedict, Jayhawkers, 156-159; Ian Michael Spurgeon, Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The 1st Kansas Colored, the Civil War’s First African American Combat Unit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 41-42; Kristen Epps, Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 166-167, see post.

[24] Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 45-46; Oakes, Freedom National, 169.