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.

PRINTABLE NARRATIVE

DATELINE: OCTOBER 27, 1849, ST. LOUIS

Henry, Jeff, Pell, and Tim must have mapped out their escape from slavery long before the night of Saturday, October 27, 1849. The four young men, ranging in age from 20 to 30, planned an audacious path out of St. Louis that involved assistance from African American and white abolitionists on both sides of the Missouri-Illinois border. At first, everything went according to plan. North of St. Louis, they boarded a skiff with a free black man named Bill Williams and reached Gabaret Island. There, Williams and the freedom seekers hopped aboard a second boat piloted by several white abolitionists who took them to the Illinois shore. They continued on land, tromping northward by foot for more than 20 miles–only to be recaptured within 24 hours. But their return to Missouri would prove no simple matter, as their slaveholders, some of the most influential men in St. Louis, quickly learned. [1] The resulting legal drama was among the many fugitive cases that ratcheted up sectional tensions on the eve of the Civil War, as enslaved people’s routes to freedom along the Underground Railroad swerved into northern courtrooms.

 

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

The term “slave stampede” was on the lips of many Missourians in late 1849. Not only did the St. Louis Republican proclaim the escape of Henry, Jeff, Pell, and Tim a “stampede,” but the organ reminded its readers of other recent group escapes, reiterating the popular conviction that numerous enslaved Missourians “have been stampeded” by abolitionists. Just days later, reports filtered into the city about a “stampede” of more than 30 freedom seekers from Canton in northeastern Missouri. Press coverage of the Canton stampede eclipsed the much-smaller group flight from St. Louis, though papers in Kentucky and New York still reprinted the St. Louis Republican‘s initial report. [2]

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

The slaveholders who claimed Henry, Jeff, Pell, and Tim ranked among the wealthiest and most prominent residents of St. Louis. Henry, a 20-year-old enslaved man, had been a domestic servant to slaveholding businessman John S. McCune. In addition to enslaving two other people, McCune operated the Mississippi Foundry, a firm that specialized in making steam engines, and laid claim to over $70,000 worth of real estate in 1850. [3] McCune was linked by business to Pell’s slaveholder, Alban Harvey Glasby, a wealthy farmer originally from Pennsylvania who lived on the outskirts of St. Louis. Glasby owned more than $100,000 worth of real estate, and held at least one enslaved person, 20-year-old Pell. [4] Then there was Emmanuel Block, who enslaved 24-year-old Tim. Block had apparently “hired out” (or rented) Tim to work as a fireman on one of the many steamboats traversing the Mississippi. Block himself hailed from Europe, but by 1849 had joined St. Louis’s elite and held some 24 people in slavery. [5] Rounding out the coterie of slaveholders was Williamson Pittman, a wealthy farmer from Palmyra, Missouri, who appears to have hired out 30-year-old Jeff to work in St. Louis. [6]

The details surrounding Henry, Jeff, Pell, and Tim’s escape are murky. But key to their efforts was Bill Williams, an African American activist. Williams had a record of aiding freedom seekers, so much so the city’s leading newspaper derisively called him “an old offender in this kind of work.” Just weeks earlier, Williams had been caught helping three enslaved Missourians to escape aboard the steamer Daniel Hillman. For unknown reasons, he evaded jail time. At some point, the four freedom seekers met Williams and made known their desire for liberty. Williams agreed to help them exit slavery. [7]

On Saturday night, October 27, their plan sprung into motion. The four freedom seekers plodded about three miles north of the city limits to the vicinity of Bissell’s Ferry, where they met Williams–near the same spot from which another group of freedom seekers would launch a “stampede” in May 1855. Clambering aboard a skiff with Williams, they navigated to Gabaret Island in the center of the Mississippi River, where they rendezvoused with several unidentified “white men” who were evidently contacted by Williams or the freedom seekers to aid in the escape. They guided the four freedom seekers together with Williams to the Illinois shore, and may have pointed the way for the party to continue the roughly 17 miles north to Alton, Illinois. [8]

But not everyone would go to Alton. Jeff, by far the oldest at age 30, was also disabled. “When walking he limps very badly,” observed his enslaver, Williamson Pittman, “one leg being several inches shorter than the other.” Once on the Illinois side of the river, Jeff remained “to make what progress he could.” Whether his departure from the group was pre-arranged, or a decision made in the spur of the moment, remains unclear. [9]

Later that night, the group passed Alton. They were eight miles north of Alton, nearing the Jersey county line, when two men seized them sometime on Sunday, October 28. The captors, William R. Bowmar and his brother, were likely local men. News of the $700 reward offered for the freedom seekers could not have possibly reached Illinois by then–the escape had occurred less than 24 hours earlier, and the slaveholders’ ad would not even be published in St. Louis papers until November 3. Rather, the brothers probably sighted the men, suspected they were freedom seekers, and acted in anticipation of a hefty reward. On Monday morning, October 29, the Bowmars led Henry, Pell, and Tim, along with Bill Williams, into the jail at nearby Jerseyville. Leaving the captives behind, they headed south to St. Louis to make contact with the slaveholders. [10]

Crucially, the freedom seekers’ recapture did not spell certain reenslavement. Although there was a federal fugitive slave law on the books from 1793, it left enforcement in the hands of northern states. And while many white northerners were deeply racist, northern state laws still afforded critical protections to black people arrested within their borders as freedom seekers. Often framed as anti-kidnapping statutes, they gave African Americans the benefit of the doubt in court when their status as free or enslaved was contested. [11] Accordingly on Tuesday, October 30, local abolitionists obtained a writ of habeas corpus and demanded a hearing for the accused freedom seekers. The writ was granted, and Henry, Pell, Tim, and Bill Williams were released from the Jerseyville jail in custody of the town’s deputy sheriff, Murray Cheney. Only the writ was made deliverable not in Jerseyville, but rather to the Illinois state circuit court meeting some 70 miles to the north in Beardstown. [12]

This was no accident. The two abolitionists who secured the writ, Baptist minister Elihu Palmer and local farmer Isaac Snedeker, were intimately familiar with an Underground Railroad route running north from Jerseyville through Carrollton, Jacksonville, and Chandlerville. Snedeker, who lived the northern outskirts of Jerseyville (around what later became the 900 block of North State Street), had a reputation as “a most daring conductor.” Local residents would later attest that Snedeker regularly conveyed freedom seekers in his wagon from Jerseyville through Carrollton and on to Jacksonville. Usually Snedeker only made trips at night. But now with the writ of habeas corpus in hand, Palmer and Snedeker weaponized Illinois state law to escort the freedom seekers northward in broad daylight. So on Tuesday afternoon, Henry, Pell, Tim, and Bill Williams piled into Snedeker’s wagon, along with the abolitionist minister Elijah Palmer, Deputy Sheriff Cheney, and Jerseyville’s former postmaster Perley Silleway, and headed north “in a hurry.” [13]

To view an interactive map of this stampede, check out our StorymapJS version at Knight Lab

By 10 pm that night, they had covered the 13 miles to Carrollton. Driving the carriage, Snedeker “gave the whip to his team” and tried to press onward through the town. But the two local officials seem to have soured on their abolitionist driver. They preferred to head due west from Carrollton to the Illinois River, where they would board a steam boat and travel by water to Beardstown. Snedeker insisted on traveling overland, by the same Underground Railroad route he knew well. So when the wagon entered Carrollton, Silleway, the former postmaster, seized the reins and led Williams and the three freedom seekers into the Carrollton jail for the night. The delay afforded time for the Missouri slaveholders to overtake the group, as they galloped into Carrollton early on Wednesday morning, October 31. [14]

Still all parties were headed to Beardstown. Recognizing they might face kidnapping charges under Illinois state law or a forcible rescue attempt if they simply seized the four freedom seekers and turned back to Missouri, the slaveholders carefully maintained the appearance of following the letter of the law, despite later carping about free states’ “interference” with their rights to human “property.” The group covered the 55 tension-ridden miles to Beardstown, where they probably arrived sometime on Thursday, November 1. They were granted an “immediate” hearing before Illinois state circuit court judge David M. Woodson. [15]

The legal battle was short but heated. To represent Henry, Pell, Tim, and Bill Williams, Elijah Palmer procured the services of two lawyers. The first was David A. Smith, a slaveholder who had emigrated to Illinois from Alabama in the late 1830s and bound his enslaved laborers as indentured servants so he could carry them onto free soil. Nonetheless he soon gained a reputation as an abolitionist. The other, Murray McConnel, had lived in Missouri before relocating to Illinois, where he became prominent in Democratic politics. Several years earlier, McConnel had represented an enslaved woman named Lucinda in a successful freedom suit that took place in his hometown of Jacksonville. [16]

In the packed courtroom at Beardstown, Smith and McConnel made the case that the four men were being held illegally. This apparently referred to manner of their initial arrest by the Bowmars. Smith then made what the slaveholders disparagingly called “an inflammatory abolition speech.” He “quoted the Declaration of Independence, about all men being born free and equal, &c.” and then raised the subject of kidnapping. The court needed to be sure, Smith stressed, that it was not green-lighting a kidnapping and sending “men born free” into slavery. The slaveholders responded in kind by retaining two  attorneys of their own, both of whom had connections to then-former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln: Henry E. Dummer, a Whig from Beardstown and political ally of Lincoln’s, and Thomas C. Browne, who until recently had served on the Illinois Supreme Court. (Lincoln had defended Browne at an 1848 trial to remove him from the bench for incompetence.) Brown took center stage and blasted the antislavery attorney, seething that “such speeches were calculated to create strife and bad feelings between citizens of sister States, and ought not to be indulged.” But Browne and Dummer admitted the four men were being held illegally. And just like that, Judge Woodson released Henry, Pell, Tim, and Bill Williams. [17]

Woodson’s order, however, only affirmed that the initial arrest had been illegal. It did not declare the four men free. Upon exiting the courtroom, the slaveholders rearrested the freedom seekers and Williams and brought them before a local justice of the peace, who gave his blessing and allowed the enslavers to return to Missouri with their captives in tow. [18]

 

AFTERMATH

As the court case wrapped up, the steamboat Daniel Hillman docked at Beardstown, on its regular route from St. Louis up the Illinois River to Peoria and Peru, Illinois. It was a familiar, if unwelcome sight for Bill Williams. Weeks before on that very boat, Williams had attempted to lead several other enslaved Missourians to freedom. That effort too had failed. The ship’s captain, A.B. Dewitt, was quick to recognize Williams, expressing surprise “on finding him so soon at his work again.” Captain Dewitt was more than happy to oblige the slaveholders, transporting Williams, Henry, Pell, and Tim back to Missouri. [19]

Once in St. Louis, Williams was quickly placed in jail to await trial. He reportedly confessed to “his agency in enticing” Henry, Jeff, Pell, and Tim from slavery, and St. Louis’s slaveholding elite clamored to see an “example” made of Williams. “A few years service in the Penitentiary may convince others, perhaps, of the impropriety of interfering with the slaves in Missouri,” threatened the St. Louis Republican. However, it is unclear if Williams’s case was brought to trial, and his name disappears from the record soon after. [20]

As for the four freedom seekers Williams tried to help out of slavery, their fates also remain uncertain. Nothing more was heard of Jeff, the oldest of the group who split off soon after reaching the Illinois shore. As of November 5, he had not been recaptured. Only one of the four men can be documented with some certainty. Twenty-year-old Pell remained enslaved to Alban Glasby until the slaveholder’s death in 1855. Then in March 1856, Glasby’s estate hired out Pell for $120 to work for John S. McCune, the man who had enslaved Pell’s fellow freedom seeker, Henry. [21]

 

FURTHER READING

The initial report in the St. Louis Republican specified that six enslaved people had escaped from the city. But the ad placed by the enslavers days later, as well as subsequent coverage, only referred to four freedom seekers, Henry, Jeff, Pell, and Tim. [22] The most exhaustive coverage of the escape and legal case comes from a report in the St. Louis Republican on November 5. The editors acknowledged that they drew extensively from the interrogation and confession of Williams upon his capture, and evidently also from the oral testimony of slaveholders about the court case in Illinois. [23] As yet, scholars have not discussed the 1849 stampede.

 

ADDITIONAL IMAGES

 

 

[1] “$700 Reward,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 3, 1849; “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849.

[2] “A Stampede,” St. Louis, MO Republican, October 29, 1849; “Stampedes,” Louisville, KY Daily Courier, November 2, 1849; “A Stampede,” Poughkeepsie, NY Journal, November 17, 1849.

[3] 1850 U.S. Census, Ward 3, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, Family 1220, Ancestry; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Ward 3, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, Ancestry; Find A Grave, [WEB]; Morrison’s St. Louis Directory, for 1852, (St. Louis: Missouri Republican Office, 1852), 160 [WEB]; Missouri Historical Society of Saint Louis: Constitution and By-Laws (St. Louis, MO: Democrat, 1875), 19-20, [WEB].

[4] 1850 U.S. Census, District 82, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, Family 1676, Ancestry; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, District 82, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, Ancestry; Missouri Historical Society of Saint Louis: Constitution and By-Laws, 19-20, [WEB]; Find A Grave, [WEB].

[5] 1850 US Census, Ward 3, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, Family 119, Ancestry; 1860 US Census, Ward 4, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, Family 1019, Ancestry; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Ward 3, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, Ancestry; 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Ward 5, St. Louis, St. Louis County, MO, Ancestry; Kennedy’s Saint Louis City Directory for the year 1857, (Saint Louis: R.V. Kennedy, 1857), 24 [WEB]; Emancipations, St. Louis Circuit Court, NPS, [WEB]; Find A Grave, [WEB].

[6] 1850 U.S. Census, Palmyra, Marion County, MO, Family 283, Ancestry; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Palmyra, Marion County, MO, Ancestry; Find A Grave, [WEB].

[7] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849.

[8] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849. The November 5 report in the St. Louis Republican, chiefly using information from Williams, who “made a full confession of all the facts of the case” after his capture, placed the crossing site at “the head of Gabourie [Gabaret] Island.” This suggests the departure site was not far from the present-day Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing site, which marks the location where another group of freedom seekers pushed off in May 1855. See post. Bissell’s Ferry was used as a place marker by contemporaries in describing the 1855 stampede.

[9] “$700 Reward,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 3, 1849; “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849.

[10] “$700 Reward,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 3, 1849; “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849. The report in the St. Louis Republican identified the captors as a William R. Bowmar and his brother. They may have been local men, though census records do not show any Bowmars residing in Jersey county in either 1850 or 1860.

[11] See Matthew Pinsker, “After 1850: Reassessing the Impact of the Fugitive Slave Law,” in D.A. Pargas, ed., Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America (2018), esp. 97-98.

[12] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849; Marshall M. Cooper, History of Jerseyville, Illinois, 1822 to 1901 (Jerseyville, IL: Jerseyville Republican, 1901), 153, [WEB].

[13] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849; Perley Silleway, appointed U.S. postmaster at Jerseyville July 31, 1845, U.S. Postmasters Appointments, Ancestry; Cooper, History of Jerseyville, 17, [WEB]. The St. Louis Republican indirectly referred to the route, seething that the court hearing in Beardstown was arranged so as to be “on the route which the negroes and their allies were to take.” Details can be pieced together from allusions in contemporary reports, as well as recollections solicited decades later by Underground Railroad historian Wilbur H. Siebert. Several correspondents referred to Snedeker’s involvement in the Underground Railroad, one advising Siebert to write to Snedeker’s surviving family members because he “had several encounters and hair-breadth escapes.” See W. Chauncy Carter to Wilbur Siebert, March 9, 1896, Wilbur H. Siebert Underground Railroad Collection, Ohio History Connection, [WEB]; D.J. Murphy to Wilbur Siebert, May 7, 1896, Siebert Collection, Ohio History Connection, [WEB]; Carl L. Spicer, “The Underground Railroad in Southern Illinois,” 8, 17-18, Siebert Collection, Ohio History Connection, [WEB]. Snedeker’s descendants were eager to relate stories about their abolitionist grandfather. See “Abolitionist Hid Runaway Slaves in Vinegar Vat,” Alton, IL Evening Telegraph, June 21, 1939; “Old Jersey House Was Part of Underground Railroad,” Alton, IL Evening Telegraph, February 12, 1959.

[14] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849.

[15] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849. For the original 1819 anti-kidnapping statute and punishments, see sections 56-57 of “Offences against the persons of individuals,” The Revised Laws of Illinois (Vandalia, IL: Greiner & Sherman, 1833), 180-181, [WEB].

[16] George Murray McConnel, “Some Reminiscences of My Father, Murray McConel,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 18:1 (April 1925): 89-100; Mark E. Steiner (ed.), “Abolitionists and Escaped Slaves in Jacksonville,” Illinois Historical Journal 89:4 (Winter 1996): 213-232; Don Harrison Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-70 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 54-55; Doris Broehl Hopper, David A. Smith: Abolitionist, Patron of Learning, Prairie Lawyer (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Richard L. Miller, Lincoln and His World (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2006), 1:195.

[17] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849; Thomas C. Browne, Illinois Courts, [WEB]; Paul M. Angle, “The Record of a Friendship: A Series of Letters from Lincoln to Henry E. Dummer,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 31:2 (June 1938): 125-137. There was evidently some confusion about the legality of the initial arrest. Attorneys for the slaveholders “admitted the illegality,” an admission which Judge Woodson declared as the reason behind his decision to discharge the four men. Woodson added that if the enslavers “had not done so, he should have directed their [the freedom seekers’] commitment to jail, there to remain and be proceeded with according to law.”

[18] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849.

[19] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849. For a typical advertisement outlining the Daniel Hillman‘s route, see “For Peoria and Peru,” St. Louis, MO Republican, April 10, 1849.

[20] “Bill Williams,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 8, 1849. Later that month, a newspaper to the north in Marion county, Missouri, reported the death of a “negro who went by the name of Bill Williams” in the county jail. It is unlikely that this report refers to the same Williams involved in the stampede. It is unclear why Williams would have been moved from the jail at St. Louis to one in Marion county. See “Not Very Consoling,” Hannibal, MO Courier, November 29, 1849.

[21] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849; Alban H. Glasby Estate Inventory, Case File 4666-4673, Probate Court, St. Louis, MO, Ancestry. By the time census takers visited slaveholder Williamson Pittman in 1850, he told them he held two enslaved people, neither of whom matched Jeff’s description. It is possible Jeff did elude capture, or that he was recaptured and sold by Pittman. See 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Palmyra, Marion County, MO, Ancestry.

[22] “A Stampede,” St. Louis, MO Republican, October 29, 1849; “$700 Reward,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 3, 1849.

[23] “Apprehension of Runaway Negroes–Conduct of Abolitionists in Illinois,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 5, 1849.

PRINTABLE NARRATIVE

DATELINE: OCTOBER 29, 1853, PALMYRA, MO

“Within a month past, there has been a great stir, advertising, telegraphing, and hunting property from Missouri,” the Mendon, Illinois abolitionist Jireh Platt confided to his diary in December 1853. “Oh, what a spectacle! Eleven pieces of property, walking in Indian file, armed and equipped facing the North Star!  $3000.00 offered for their apprehension, after they were safe in Canada! The hunters say they must have gone from Mendon to Jacksonville on a new track.” [1]

The daring escape Platt described had been set in motion little more than a month earlier, on Saturday night, October 29, 1853. Fleeing from a series of farms and homes clustered around the border town of Palmyra, Missouri, 11 freedom seekers–men, women, and children among them–charted a course across the moonlit Mississippi River to Quincy, Illinois. Not stopping, they plodded on an additional 12 miles, reaching the town of Mendon, Illinois before daybreak the next morning. [2]

Situated mere miles from the Illinois border and free soil, slaveholders throughout Marion county, Missouri found themselves constantly combatting escapes. But this latest episode proved “more alarming in extent.” As the Palmyra Whig attested days later, “there must have been a full and perfect understanding among these several servants,” who left the farms and residences of six different enslavers at the same time. Visions of enslaved people seizing their freedom in concert unnerved Missouri slaveholders, though most contended that the root of the problem lay not inside slaveholding households, but rather in outside agitation. Antislavery preachers and abolitionist operatives, they insisted, were responsible for the mounting number of escapes. Thus in the weeks and months following the nighttime exodus, slaveholders in Marion county mounted an aggressive campaign to “close our doors against abolition and free soil influences.” [3] Slaveholders’ frenzied efforts to clamp shut their doors triggered a months-long war of words with their Illinois neighbors and church officials, revealing how coordinated group escapes inflamed political tensions over slavery on the eve of the Civil War.

 

STAMPEDE CONTEXT

Even before the Palmyra escape took place, slaveholders in Missouri already felt under siege in 1853, as a mounting number of “stampedes” occurred throughout the state. Back in May, a widely-circulated report from the Alton, Illinois Telegraph headlined “Slave Stampedes,” announced that “slaves are running away from Missouri, at the present time, in battalions.” It thus comes as little surprise that the term was used to describe the group flight from Palmyra mere months later. While initial reporting from the Palmyra Whig did not employ the word “stampede,” in mid-November the neighboring Hannibal Courier situated the escape within “several stampedes among the negroes” that had occurred recently. Around the same time, the Boston Herald summarized a bulletin about the episode originally published in the Chicago Tribune, affixing the new headline, “A Stampede.” As controversy over the escape escalated throughout the winter, the Quincy, Illinois Whig employed the term on multiple occasions while defending its residents from allegations of “their supposed connexion with slave stampedes from the other side of the river.” Still later in February 1854, the Palmyra Whig referred to the October escape as the “recent stampede of negroes.” [4]

 

MAIN NARRATIVE

Although their actions made headlines, the names of the 11 enslaved Missourians who struck out for freedom do not survive. They were claimed by six slaveholders from Palmyra and adjoining Fabius township, at the northeastern corner of Marion county. Six of the freedom seekers–a man, a woman, and four children, likely a family–fled from slaveholder Albert Gallatin Johnson’s farm some nine miles north of Palmyra. Their flight may have been motivated by their enslaver’s future plans. When he put his farm up for sale in May, Johnson had announced his intention of relocating to Texas. The family of six probably feared forced removal to the Deep South, or worse yet, being separated at the auction block. [5] Four other enslaved people, apparently all men, escaped from the Fabius township farms of slaveholders Rufus Mathews, Jeremiah K. Taylor, Caleb Taylor, and a female slaveholder identified only as Mrs. Hopkins. [6] Rounding out the group of escapees was an eleventh freedom seeker, an enslaved man who escaped from the Palmyra home of prominent slaveholding lawyer John T. Redd. [7]

Living on adjoining farms, or perhaps even members of the same extended family, these 11 enslaved people knew one another well. After what must have involved considerable planning and coordination, they slipped away on Saturday night, October 29, reaching Mendon, Illinois in the predawn hours of Sunday, October 30. Once their absence was noticed, Marion county slaveholders scrambled to action. On Monday afternoon, October 31, a large posse of white Missourians headed to Quincy in pursuit, but the freedom seekers were long since gone. Nonetheless, when the Palmyra Whig went to press on Thursday, November 3, its editors still thought it possible that the freedom seekers “may all be secured and returned to their masters.” [8]

Even as they sought to track down the runaways, slaveholding Missourians were quick to accuse white abolitionists of having masterminded the escape. The Palmyra Whig postulated that “some person or persons well acquainted with the best mode of effecting the escape of fugitives” had been involved. Residents in Fabius township singled out Quincy, Illinois, “a city containing some of the vilest abolition thieves in the Mississippi valley.” Some 20 miles to the southeast, editors of the Hannibal Courier concurred, pronouncing it “our opinion that the emissaries of negro-stealing societies are prowling about the country, exciting the slave population to insubordination, and enticing them away from their masters.” Further to the west, the Paris, Missouri Mercury agreed that the runaways must have been “assisted by white friends.” [9]

To be sure, slaveholders often blamed white activists for “enticing” enslaved people to escape, even when they had no evidence to back up those charges. Reared in proslavery logic, many white southerners imagined that enslaved people (whom they considered an inferior race) would not choose to seek out liberty on their own, or be capable of escaping without outside help. Some scholars have argued that white southerners’ obsession with antislavery “emissaries” bordered on a “conspiracy theory,” allowing slaveholders to maintain that enslaved people themselves were not resisting, and the only source of unrest originated from outside actors. But while that might hold true in the Deep South, the historian Stanley Harrold cautions that in border slave states like Missouri, concerns about antislavery activists were by no means unfounded. In 1841, to name just one example, three students from Quincy had crossed the river to Marion county in an abortive attempt to help runaways. They were captured, denounced by a Palmyra prosecutor as “notorious land pirates,” and each sentenced to lengthy spells in the Missouri State Penitentiary. Indeed, while it remains unclear if the 11 freedom seekers had help from the very outset, they likely did obtain aid from a network of abolitionists soon after crossing into Illinois. [10]

There was a well-established Underground Railroad “route” running from Quincy to Mendon, the very route the freedom seekers were known to have taken. About one mile west of Mendon was the farm of abolitionist Jireh Platt, who logged details about the escape in his diary in December 1853. Decades later in 1896, his son Jeremiah Evarts Platt revealed more about the assistance the Platt family likely gave to the Palmyra freedom seekers, writing that “eleven slaves came along at one time some of them women.” Platt recalled that he and his relatives concealed the freedom seekers under hay in “two tightly covered wagons.” It was “not practicable” to stop at Plymouth, some 30 miles to the northeast and traditionally the next place of refuge for escapees, so Platt drove for some 60 miles in the direction of Chicago, returning home a full four days later. Jeremiah believed that he was “about 17 years old” at the time of the escape described, which would place the incident in the early 1850s. Although written decades apart, together these two remarkable sources strongly suggest that the Platt family helped the Palmyra freedom seekers on their quest for liberty. [11]

Meanwhile, slaveholders Albert Johnson and Rufus Mathews offered up a sizable $3,000 reward, even telegraphing ahead to where they correctly suspected the runaways were headed–Chicago. However, the city was a center of opposition to the recently-passed 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the editors of the Chicago Tribune (a Free Soil newspaper) refused to even run the enslavers’ ad. “No one need apply,” the Tribune mocked, unless prepared to “sell his soul, for ‘thirty pieces.'” On November 16, a group of white Missourians arrived in Chicago in pursuit, distributing handbills that prominently announced the $3,000 reward. But the Chicago Tribune ridiculed them the very next day, announcing that the slaveholders were “too late.” Already about a week prior, the the 11 freedom-bound Missourians had reached Chicago and departed for Canada. [12]

After crossing into Canada, at least some of the freedom seekers chose to settle in Chatham, Ontario, a thriving Black community and home to many freedom seekers from the United States. In 1854, some white Palmyra residents visited Chatham and recognized the men “that run off last fall,” who they did not identify by name, except to say that they were formerly enslaved by Caleb Taylor and John Redd. According to the white Missourians, the freedom seekers gave them a “cordial greeting,” all while insisting they “were not willing to return.” The freedom seekers seemed at ease talking to white men from the community they had so recently escaped from, because they knew that Canadian authorities had long refused to extradite American freedom seekers. So long as they remained on Canadian soil, their freedom was secure. [13]

 

AFTERMATH

Panicked slaveholders convened at Palmyra on Monday, November 7 to form the Marion Association, a proslavery vigilance group. Declaring that “by the action of the Abolitionists, our rights and property are eminently endangered,” the Association outlined a system for a new slave patrol. For a fee of five dollars, slaveholders could join the organization, which would keep a detailed description of their human property on file, and promised to immediately pursue any freedom seekers. [14]

After several meetings in November, the Marion Association invited Thomas L. Anderson, a local Whig politician, to speak at a December 24 gathering. Before “one of the largest audiences” ever assembled in the county court house at Palmyra, Anderson invoked biblical justifications for slavery, while denouncing “fanatics” from Quincy, whom he alleged “have for some time carried on a secret intercourse with our slaves.” Anderson knew of what he spoke. In May 1848, an enslaved woman he held named Hannah Coger had escaped from his residence in Marion county and traveled through Quincy, before reaching the Platte farm in Mendon. In his diary, abolitionist Jireh Platte recorded Coger’s arrival on May 19 and her backstory–Coger had apparently been trying to purchase her freedom, and was only $100 shy of doing so before she bolted to Illinois. [15]

But now on Christmas Eve 1853, Anderson addressed the latest stampede from Marion county. A few weeks prior, he bellowed, “from twelve to fifteen thousand dollars worth of slave property has been clandestinely removed from our midst.” Almost as galling, Anderson added, was that local slaveholders had been “laughed at, ridiculed and insulted, for making legal and constitutional efforts to capture the flying refugees”–apparently referring to the Chicago Tribune‘s sardonic refusal to publish Johnson and Mathew’s reward notice, and mocking remarks about the pursuers being “too late.” Anderson, who in 1856 would be elected to represent northeastern Missouri in Congress, concluded by suggesting that local residents “suspend all business and intercourse” with their Illinois neighbors. [16]

Anderson’s fiery speech electrified his white listeners, but he was not the first proslavery Missourian to suggest severing ties with Illinois. In mid-November, the anonymous correspondent “Marion” called upon Missouri residents to resolve “neither to buy or sell to any citizen of Illinois and of Quincy in particular,” and “have no intercourse with them till they put down negro-stealing.” The Quincy Whig thundered back, unconvinced that “any citizen of Quincy had anything to do with the recent negro stampede.” Behind the volley of accusations was the reality that frequent stampedes had jarred many Missouri slaveholders into a siege mentality. “Almost every man in Northern Missouri can attest,” read a column in the Hannibal Courier, “the public mind is kept in a constant state of fermentation and nervous irritability.” Convinced that outside emissaries were behind the October stampede and similar escapes, slaveholders sought to insulate their farms, households, and human property from contact with northerners. [17]

Accordingly, slaveholders’ next order of business was to expel Rev. William Sellers, a northern Methodist minister. In 1844, the Methodist Church fractured into northern and southern wings over clashing teachings about slavery. When Sellers, a member of the northern branch who was known for his antislavery sentiments, announced that he would preach in Fabius township, local whites erupted in outrage. A committee of five–among them Caleb Taylor, one of the slaveholders impacted by the October stampede–tried to meet with Sellers and “ascertain his views upon the subject of slavery.” When Sellers demurred, a public meeting was held on February 18, 1854, at the Union School house in Fabius township. Although the presiding elder of the church, J.H. Dennis, appeared and lobbied for “religious toleration,” local slaveholders blasted the church for “their unholy crusade upon our rights,” and Sellers for attempting to “create disaffection among our slaves.” They warned that any northern Methodist “preaching or teaching in this community” would be greeted as “unfriendly to our best interests, and as a disturber of the peace.” [18]

To view an interactive map of this stampede, check out our StorymapJS version at Knight Lab

FURTHER READING

The most detailed report of the escape was published by the Palmyra Whig on November 3. Subsequently, minutes from the Marion Association’s meetings, as well as editorials, were printed in editions of the Palmyra Whig, Hannibal Courier, and Quincy Whig. [19]

Although many members of the Marion Association, as well as local presses, readily leveled blame at white abolitionists for the escape, other members pointed the finger at free African Americans. At a January 2, 1854 meeting held at Palmyra, the Marion Association sought to clamp down on the presence of free African Americans in the state. They urged Missouri lawmakers to make it illegal to manumit a bond person, unless they were transported to the West African colony of Liberia. The Hannibal Courier reported on proceedings approvingly, imploring readers to be cognizant of the “example and corrupting influence of the free negroes that we permit to remain among us.” [20]

Benjamin Merkel’s 1943 essay “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders, 1840-1860” was among the first scholarly works to mention the October 1853 escape. Merkel read Hannibal and Palmyra papers, and suggested that the freedom seekers were “probably assisted by abolitionists.” [21] More recently, Stanley Harrold’s Border War (2010) indirectly refers to the escape while reporting on Thomas Anderson’s thundering antiabolitionist speech at Palmyra. Harrold situates the proslavery gathering within the broader context of what many in the Border South perceived as “assaults on its economic, social, cultural, and racial status quo.” [22] Richard Blackett’s The Captive’s Quest for Freedom (2018) notes the episode and the increased “vigilance” practiced by slaveholders in its wake. Blackett contends that proslavery vigilance groups, such as the Marion Association, succeeded in quelling the number of escapes from the Palmyra region. Reports of escapes from Marion county “ceased for a while,” he observes, until spiking again during the summer of 1857. [23]

 

ADDITIONAL IMAGES

 

[1] According to son Henry Dutton Platt, his father Jireh maintained both a a “diary & farm record” and a “blue book,” the latter which contained “vastly more” details, though its whereabouts remains unknown. Henry Platt wrote Underground Railroad historian Wilbur Siebert drawing excerpts from Jireh Platt’s diary and farm book. He said the entry for December 1853 quoted above only identified the month (December) and not the year, but it appears  clear from the context that it was written in 1853. See Henry Dutton Platt, “Some Facts about the Underground Railroad in Ill.,” Wilbur H. Siebert Underground Railroad Collection, Ohio History Connection, [WEB].

[2] “Runaway Negroes,” Palmyra, MO Whig, November 3, 1853, reprinted in St. Louis, MO Democrat, November 7, 1853.[WEB]

[3] “Runaway Negroes,” Palmyra, MO Whig, November 3, 1853, reprinted in St. Louis, MO Democrat, November 7, 1853 [WEB];”Public Meeting,” Palmyra, MO Whig, February 23, 1854. 

[4] “Slave Stampedes,” Alton, IL Telegraph, May 23, 1853, quoted in Boston Liberator, June 10, 1853; “Negro Stealing,” Hannibal, MO Courier, November 10, 1853; “A Stampede,” Boston Herald, November 15, 1853; “The Feeling Across the River,” Quincy, IL Whig, December 2, 1853; “Misrepresentation,” Quincy, IL Whig, December 12, 1853; “Prompt Proceedings,” Palmyra, MO Whig, February 23, 1854.

[5] “Farm For Sale,” Palmyra, MO Whig, May 26, 1853; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Fabius Township, Marion County, MO, Ancestry; 1850 U.S. Census, Fabius Township, Marion County, MO, Family 167, Ancestry; Find A Grave, [WEB]. The editors of the Palmyra Whig drew additional attention to Johnson’s advertisement, praising his land as “one of the most desirable farms in the county.” For the number of enslaved people who escaped from each slaveholder, see the original Palmyra Whig report, “Runaway Negroes,” Palmyra, MO Whig, November 3, 1853, reprinted in St. Louis, MO Democrat, November 7, 1853.

[6] 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Fabius Township, Marion County, MO, Ancestry; 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Fabius Township, Marion County, MO, Ancestry; 1850 U.S. Census, Fabius Township, Marion County, MO, Family 130, Ancestry; Find A Grave, [WEB]. The Palmyra Whig alluded that the individual enslaved by Mrs. Hopkins had been residing with a John Gwynn of neighboring Lewis county, likely meaning that they had been hired out (or rented) to Gwynn. Evidently this individual journeyed south from Lewis county on Saturday, October 29, to join the group somewhere in Fabius township.

[7] 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Palmyra, Marion County, MO, Ancestry; 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Palmyra, Marion County, MO; 1850 U.S. Census, Palmyra, Marion County, MO, Family 320, Ancestry; Find A Grave, [WEB].

[8] “Runaway Negroes,” Palmyra, MO Whig, November 3, 1853, reprinted in St. Louis, MO Democrat, November 7, 1853 [WEB].

[9] “Runaway Negroes,” Palmyra, MO Whig, November 3, 1853, reprinted in St. Louis, MO Democrat, November 7, 1853 [WEB]; “Negro Stealing,” Hannibal, MO Courier, November 10, 1853; Paris, MO Mercury, quoted in St. Louis, MO Democrat, November 16, 1853; “Public Meeting,” Palmyra, MO Whig, February 23, 1854.

[10] The historian Larry Gara was among the first to argue that southern fears of an extensive Underground Railroad network stretching deep into slave territory were wildly exaggerated. See Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1961), 18, 84-87, [see post]. On the “conspiracy theory” line of thinking, see John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 274-279. For Harrold’s historiographical intervention, see Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting Over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 42, and for the July 1841 episode, 50-52, [see post]. The three abolitionist students involved in the 1841 incident (James Burr, George Thompson, Alanson Work) later authored a memoir Prison Life and Reflections: Or, A Narrative of the Arrest, Trial, Conviction, Imprisonment, Treatment, Observations, Reflections, and Deliverance of Work, Burr and Thompson… (Hartford, OH: A. Work, 1850), [WEB].

[11] Jeremiah Evarts Platt to Wilbur Siebert, March 28, 1896, Siebert Collection, Ohio History Connection, [WEB]. Also see letters and essay from his brother, Henry Dutton Platt, also written to Siebert. Henry Dutton Platt to Wilbur Siebert, March 20, 1896, Siebert Collection, Ohio History Connection, [WEB]; Henry Dutton Platt, “Some Facts about the Underground Railroad in Ill.,” Siebert Collection, Ohio History Connection, [WEB]. See post on Siebert’s work.

[12] “Clear the Track! The Train is Coming,” Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1853 [WEB]; “Too Late,” Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1853, quoted in Glasgow, MO Weekly Times, November 24, 1853; “Abolitionism in Missouri,” Chicago Tribune, November 22, 1853. Unfortunately, the Tribune‘s decision not to publish the ad (which according to the editors contained a “full description of each passenger”) means that there is no known record of the names of the 11 freedom seekers.

[13] “To the Eds. of the Missouri Whig,” Palmya, MO Whig, December 7, 1854. On Canadian authorities’ refusal to extradite fugitive slaves, see Gordon Barker, The Imperfect Revolution: Anthony Burns and the Landscape of Race in Antebellum America (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010), 92-97. Writing to the Palmyra Whig, the white correspondent (identified as “A.F.J.”) added that the freedom seekers’ “appearances did not indicate as good health, nor was their clothing as good as the generality of slaves in Missouri,” adding that “they wept like infants at their recollection of home.” Free Black settlements in Canada were by no means unvisited by hardship, though slaveholders routinely exaggerated the poverty and precarious lives of freedom seekers in the British provinces to deter other enslaved people from escaping.

[14] “Abolitionism in Missouri,” St. Louis, MO Republican, November 15, 1853; Quincy, IL Whig, November 21, 1853 [WEB]

[15] “T.L. Anderson, Esq.,” Hannibal, MO Courier, December 29, 1853; Henry Dutton Platt, “Some Facts about the Underground Railroad in Ill.,” Siebert Collection, Ohio History Connection, [WEB].

[16]  For a complete transcript of Anderson’s speech, see “Speech of Thomas L. Anderson, Esq.,” Quincy, IL Whig, February 6, 1854. Also see the entry for Anderson in the Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress. Anderson’s charge that “from twelve to fifteen thousand dollars worth of slave property has been clandestinely removed from our midst” comes from the Quincy Whig‘s February 6, 1854 transcript of the speech. Other sources (such as Stanley Harrold’s Border War) report a slightly different version, with Anderson saying that abolitionists carried “off eight or ten thousand dollars… [of human property] at a time.” This account comes from a 1943 article by Benjamin Merkel, who quoted from the Hannibal Whig Messenger of December 15, 1853 (before Anderson’s December 24 address had taken place). According to the Library of Congress, the Hannibal Whig Messenger is available on microfilm at the Hannibal Public Library and State Historical Society of Missouri. See Benjamin G. Merkel, “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders, 1840-1860,” Missouri Historical Review 37:3 (April 1943): 278, [WEB]; Harrold, Border War, 162.

[17] “Non-Intercourse,” Quincy, IL Whig, November 28, 1853; “The Feeling Across the River,” Quincy, IL Whig, December 2, 1853; “Misrepresentation,” Quincy, IL Whig, December 12, 1853; “The Underground Railroad Again,” Quincy, IL Whig, December 20, 1853; Another anonymous contributor, “Fabius,” declared the Quincy Whig‘s denial to be a “lie, black and foul,” while continuing to scold Illinoisans for “stealing our property.” In its November 28 weekly edition, the Quincy Whig had reprinted the Chicago Tribune‘s mocking article, which apparently enraged the anonymous correspondent Fabius, who called it “that infamous thing.”

[18] “Prompt Proceedings,” and “Public Meeting,” Palmyra, MO Whig, February 23, 1854; History of Marion County, Missouri (St. Louis: E.F. Perkins, 1884), 1:318-320, [WEB]; Lucas P. Volkman, Houses Divided; Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 94. On Sellers, also see Minutes of the Missouri Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, held in Hannibal, Missouri, March 28th to April 2nd, 1888 (Kirksville, MO: Journal Printing House, 1888), 13, [WEB].

[19] See esp. “Runaway Negroes,” Palmyra, MO Whig, November 3, 1853, reprinted in St. Louis, MO Democrat, November 7, 1853 [WEB]; “Negro Stealing,” Hannibal, MO Courier, November 10, 1853; “Marion Association,” Hannibal, MO Courier, January 12, 1854; “Public Meeting,” Palmyra, MO Whig, February 23, 1854.

[20] “Marion Association,” Palmyra, MO Whig, January 5 1854; “Complaints of the People,” and “Marion Association,” Hannibal, MO Courier, January 12, 1854.

[21] Merkel, “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders, 1840-1860,” 278.

[22] Harrold, Border War, 161-162.

[23] Richard J.M. 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), 140.