In Peoria County, Illinois in the 1850s, many enslaved people escaping from their slaveholders stopped to seek shelter in Brimfield’s Congregational Church, which was under the ministry of “violent

Brimfield Congregational Church (Brimfield Union Church)

abolitionist” J. E. Roy. According to Illinois historian Owen Muelder, one episode even involved “a party of 11 freedom seekers, who had fled from Palmyra, Missouri, carrying along “a crippled woman whom the others carried in a sheet, tied at the corners and suspended on a pole.”[1] If nothing else, this remarkable incident demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the state’s borders when examining the experiences of escaped Missouri slaves.

In The Underground Railroad in Western Illinois, Muelder, who is the director of Knox College’s Galesburg Colony Underground Railroad Freedom Center, presents a thorough overview of the major agents and activities of the Underground Railroad (UGRR) network in the “military tract” region of Western Illinois. Each chapter, organized based on the different counties of the region, is filled with stories quoted directly from original sources. In sharing these stories exactly as they were told from the voices of the abolitionist agents themselves, Muelder helps readers to “visualize more fully” the lives and stories of runaway slaves, many of which originated from Missouri, “in the late 1840s and 1850s in their valiant bid for freedom from bondage.”[2]

According to Muelder, everyone –including slaves, slaveholders, and abolitionists– was aware of the importance of the borderland between enslaved Eastern Missouri and Western Illinois. In fact, Illinois abolitionists frequently took advantage of this proximity, leading to the concentration of UGRR agents who were “eager to liberate slaves from across the river” in towns right along that border, such as in Quincy.[3] According to abolitionist Hiram Mars, Quincy abolitionists would even go as far as actually crossing the state line to seek out slaves and convince them to escape.[4]

Many of the abolitionists who risked traveling into Missouri to guide freedom seekers across the Mississippi River were themselves once escaped slaves. Throughout his text, Muelder makes reference to the ubiquitous figure of “Charlie,” an escaped Missouri slave who spent his whole life traveling in and out of slave states along the UGRR. According to numerous sources presented by Muelder, Charlie helped Missouri slaves escape along the UGRR to the Illinois counties of Plymouth, McDonough, Knox, and Stark.[5] Little is known of Charlie’s actual life and most of what is known is impossible to corroborate, but the popular narrative is that after Charlie escaped his enslavement, he returned to seek out and rescue his wife only to find that she had already been sold away. Charlie then spent years helping countless other enslaved families escape, perhaps always still searching for his wife.[6] It is possible that this story has been romanticized over the years, but nonetheless it underscores the important role that previously escaped slaves often played on the UGRR.

Charlie was certainly not alone. Chapman’s History of Knox County, Illinois describes an 1858 stampede in which “a colored man was taken through [Galesburg] to Canada, who shortly afterward found his way back to Missouri and started with nine other slaves for the land of freedom, but reached Galesburg with only five or six. With these it is presumed he got safely through to Canada.”[7] This important fact about the nature of slave stampedes, that some of them may have been initiated and led by former slaves still in hiding, emphasizes a critical aspect of the network that was essential to enabling larger group escapes.

[1] Owen Muelder, The Underground Railroad in Western Illinois (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008), 93.

[2] Galin Berrier, “The Underground Railroad in Western Illinois,”  Annals of Iowa 67:2 (2008): 225.

[3] Muelder, 35.

[4] Muelder, 8.

[5] Muelder, 55-56, 69-71, 112, 136.

[6] Muelder, 136.

[7] Muelder, 110-111.

Archer Alexander courtesy of Mid Rivers Newsmagazine

In Missouri during the Civil War, the Union army sometimes employed enslaved people as spies. One of these espionage agents, Archer Alexander, made his escape from St. Charles, Missouri to St. Louis before his former slaveholders, the Hollmans, ever discovered that he was slipping the Union “information about [their] Confederate sympathies and guerrilla activities.” [1]  After Alexander established himself in St. Louis, he asked to purchase the freedom of his family. The Hollmans refused. However, with the help of a neighbor and the protection of the Union army, the reminder of the Alexander family escaped and remained safely in St. Louis until slavery was abolished in 1865. [2] The Alexanders are perhaps a good example of wartime runaways who found freedom within Missouri state lines instead of heading across them.

Historian Dale Edwyna Smith’s African American Lives in St. Louis, 1763-1865 offers an exploration of the “unique status of African Americans in that gateway to the West, highlighting the greater freedoms and opportunity that persons of color had in the city than elsewhere in the state and the blurred lines between slaves and free.” [3]  Smith focuses on the legal and social systems of African Americans, both free and enslaved, in St. Louis. In particular, she traces the laws restricting black mobility to their roots in the colonial French legal system, the Code Noir. Smith briefly mentions group escapes in Missouri, but she does not use the word stampede. Smith does note, however, that group escapes were “rare” and usually involved families. [4]

Map of Saline County 1857

Using runaway ads from the Missouri Gazette, Smith tells the story of the Journey brothers, three enslaved men who ran away together from St. Charles.[5]  Another notable runaway ad, from slaveholder De Witt McNutt, described a mother and her young son, an individual man, and a husband and wife, who all ran together from Saline County. [6]  But in addition to these types of advertisements, Smith highlights two other ways that enslaved people in Missouri gained freedom. One process involved manumission, the freeing of slaves by their slaveholder or the purchasing of “slaves for the [expressed] purpose of manumitting them.” [7]   Another notable path to liberation in St. Louis was a contested legal process called “freedom suits.” At times, these two roads toward freedom intersected, such as in the case of the Milton Duty slaves.

Milton Duty wrote in his will his slaves were to be set free after his death. He moved from Mississippi to ensure that upon their freedom his slaves would be able to live in freedom. [8] However, a dispute over unpaid loans after Duty’s death halted the manumission of this group of 26. They were to be sold in order to pay off the debts Duty supposedly owed. And so, as a group, they sued for freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court in the spring of 1842. The charge was led by Preston and Braxton, enslaved brothers who seemed to have overseen organizing the Duty household in its move from Mississippi to Missouri. [9]  The adults sued simultaneously on behalf of themselves and their minor children. In Preston’s case, he sued on behalf of two boys, whose parentage was unknown, but “as their next friend.” [10] 

St. Louis Courthouse courtesy Missouri Historical Society

According to Smith, the “Duty case [was] striking for many reasons, not the least because in it, so many slaves simultaneously, and collectively, sued to be free.” [11] In 1845, there still was no resolution, so the Duty slaves petitioned the court again. [12]  They made minor changes in the petition (adding Duty as their last name) and increasing the number of enslaved people suing for freedom, because James Duty was born. [13]

Tyler Blow, who famously purchased and freed Dred Scott after the Supreme Court denied his freedom suit, was also involved in the Duty Case. [14] In 1854, twelve years after the failed Duty case and sixteen years after Duty’s death, Blow freed Nicene Clark, whom he claimed he had purchased from the Duty estate. [15]  Although in the end, the vast majority of the Duty slaves were never set free, this extraordinary case –a veritable legal stampede– seemed to have caused high anxiety within the state because that same year (1842) the state legislature “amended its laws to prohibit anyone from bringing slaves to Missouri from other states to set them free at a later date.” [16]

[1] Dale Edwyna Smith, African American Lives in St. Louis, 1763-1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 165.

[2] Smith, 165.

[3] Robert Kett, “The Eventual Impossibility of Compromise,” Western Illinois Historical Review 8 (2017): 34, [WEB]

[4] Smith, 129.

[5] Smith, 127.

[6] Smith, 129.

[7] Smith, 130.

[8] Smith, 109.

[9] Smith, 109.

[10] Smith, 120.

[11] Smith, 119.

[12] Smith, 122.

[13] Smith, 122.

[14] Smith, 124.

[15] Smith, 125.

[16] Smith, 119.

Daniel Drayton, captain of The Pearl, arrested in 1848, received a pardon in 1852

The Pearl incident was one of the largest attempted mass slave escapes in American history. On April 15, 1848, more than 70 enslaved people, including many children, boarded a schooner named The Pearl on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, in a daring effort organized after weeks of “preconcerted planning,” as scholar Andrew Delbanco puts it in The War Before the War (Nov. 2018), managed by an impressive network of free African Americans, white abolitionists, and the enslaved themselves. The effort was shocking to many of their opponents. Delbanco writes memorably in his new book about the fugitive crisis, that slaveholders in Washington awoke to find “Breakfasts were not ready, babies were not dressed, horses and chickens were going hungry; nobody was performing the morning tasks expected of urban slaves.” [1]

The freedom seekers, however, did not get far. Poor sailing conditions forced the ship to dock 150 miles down the Potomac, where officials soon boarded the ship, recaptured the freedom seekers and arrested three white men who helped them escape. The failed escape’s size and proximity to the nation’s capitol exacerbated slaveholder fears about slave resistance, rebellion, and violence. While the Pearl escape was itself nonviolent, the jarring nature of the event made the threat of slave resistance seem ever more palpable in the slaveholder’s imagination.

1848 poster made by the District of Columbia government shortly after the Pearl Escape, courtesy of wikepedia.org

Delbanco uses the Pearl incident as part of his wide-ranging effort to explain how the long crisis over fugitive slaves in the United States was a key dynamic behind the rising sectional tensions that ultimately led to the American Civil War. He describes the incident as the “capstone event of a decade during which the nation moved closer and closer towards a decisive confrontation with itself.” [2]

Delbanco does not use the term “stampede” to describe the 1848 event, nor does he apply that terminology to other types of group or mass escapes that he relates in his gripping narrative.  However, the noted scholar from Columbia University routinely employs phrases such as “group escape,” “maroons” and “mass exodus” when detailing larger bodies of freedom seekers escaping bondage together.  Nor does Delbanco focus explicitly on Missouri or the Mississippi Valley, but his work is still immensely helpful in contextualizing aspects of this project.  He does mention, for example,  that the “sheer volume of absconding slaves was immense” from the border state of Missouri. [3] He also explains how being a “slave in, say, St. Louis or Baltimore …meant better prospects for escape.” [4]  Although group escapes sometimes occurred in the deeper South or within interior regions, he details how they more often resulted in movement toward life as “maroons” hiding in “cleared ground and the swamp or forest beyond” for extended periods of time. [5] 

The term “stampede” does appear in Delbanco’s new book though in contexts different from antebellum mass escapes.  When describing the impact of the pivotal Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, for example, Delbanco writes that it “set off a stampede of enraged adversaries.”  The scholar also uses a memorable image from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in June 1861, captioned originally as “Stampede Among the Negroes in Virginia,”  This vivid cartoon predated a more famous one that appeared in Harper’s Weekly in August 1861, captioned, “Stampede of Slaves from Hampton to Fortress Monroe.”  Both illustrations from the summer of 1861 depicted the emergence of wartime runaways or contrabands at the very outset of the war.  And ultimately, that is Delbanco’s point.  The resistance of runaway slaves, especially through stampedes or various types of group or mass escapes, had an outsized impact on the paranoia of slaveholders. “Black violence was always lurking- at least in the white mind. And no matter how much whites wanted to believe that blacks were passive under the putatively benign regime of slavery, fugitives and rebels were a continual rebuke to this belief,” argues Delbanco. [6]

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 8, 1861 (Library of Congress)

Harpers Weekly, August 17, 1861 (Library of Congress)

[1] Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 214.

[2] Delbanco, 215.

[3] Delbanco, 25.

[4] Delbanco, 35.

[5] Delbanco, 109.

[6] Delbanco, 199.

Fugitive slaves escaping by boat. (House Divided Project)

An enslaved man in St. Louis, Missouri, William Wells Brown was filled “with the most intense anxiety” as he plotted his escape across the Mississippi River. Late one evening in 1833, Brown and his mother finally executed their plan, and riding a small skiff on a “very swift” current, the mother and son duo were “soon upon the Illinois shore.” Their taste of freedom was brief, however, and they were soon manacled by slave catchers and returned to bondage in Missouri. Yet in January 1834, Brown at last succeeded, smuggling himself on board a steamboat bound for Ohio. [1]

After escaping from slavery in St. Louis, William Wells Brown became a prominent figure in the anti-slavery movement. (House Divided Project)

Brown’s story is one of many profiled in Cheryl LaRoche’s book, The Geography of Resistance (2013). For years prior to his escape, Brown had worked on steamboats that canvassed the Mississippi River, gaining an intimate familiarity with the surrounding region. That he and his mother landed near the abolitionist stronghold of Alton, Illinois, was no accident, maintains LaRoche. Not only was Alton filled with anti-slavery sympathizers, but just miles away was a crucial, although often overlooked free African American settlement, known as Rocky Fork.

Rocky Fork is one of four African American communities along the North-South border that LaRoche profiles in her book. Of these four settlements (Rocky Fork and Miller Grove in southern Illinois, Lick Creek in Indiana, and Poke Patch in southern Ohio), just Rocky Fork survives today. With few written sources available, LaRoche taps into archaeological evidence, oral histories and geographical analysis (“using the land as a type of document”), to produce an account of what she terms “the geography of resistance.” What emerges is a portrait of African Americans, on both sides of the border, acting as central agents in determining their own fates. Most freedom seekers, LaRoche notes, “negotiated either all or the most difficult or dangerous portion of the trip alone or with the help of other Blacks.” Quakers and other white abolitionists, she writes, while playing important roles, also harbored “ambivalent sentiments” towards African Americans, and were not the driving force behind the resistance to bondage. In LaRoche’s view, geography bears this out. Many well-known Underground Railroad sites “operated within a two- to three-mile radius of small Black enclaves.” Documenting these often-overlooked black hamlets, LaRoche maintains, “visually clarifies and exposes the relationships between African American churches, settlements, and historic Underground Railroad routes.” [2] 

Missouri escapes figure prominently in LaRoche’s book, largely due to her first case study, Rocky Fork. A black settlement situated mere miles from the Missouri border, LaRoche notes that Rocky Fork was “ideally located, remote and not easily accessed.” The larger and better-known abolitionist community of Alton lay just three miles away. Difficult to reach by land, Rocky Fork was instead “highly accessible” by water, via the Mississippi River. Missouri fugitives could follow the river north to Piasa Creek, where two islands enabled them to swim or boat across to Rocky Fork Creek. The small settlement (at its peak counting 45 families) provided “a secluded, safe refuge” for Missouri fugitives, who by the 1830s were arriving with increasing regularity. Escaped slaves, LaRoche writes, enjoyed the advantages of rural living, often setting up house in remote, wooded areas, which “helped discourage pursuers,” who feared for their own safety venturing into the unknown wilderness. [3]

An 1857 map showing the abolitionist stronghold of Alton, Illinois (left center), a short distance upriver from St. Louis. Not specified is the free black community of Rocky Fork, located just three miles west of Alton. (House Divided Project)

LaRoche does not use the term slave stampede, but she does identify and discuss multiple “group escapes,” including many from eastern Missouri into Illinois. She posits that “as the slavery crisis deepened, the mechanisms of escape extended from lonely singular escapes to groups and families attempting to free themselves from bondage.” These larger escapes, LaRoche argues, turned increasingly violent and eventually gave way to “armed conflict in the name of freedom.” One of the earliest potential stampedes may have been the work of “Mother” Priscilla Baltimore, a former slave who resided in Brooklyn, Illinois, an historically black enclave located across the river from St. Louis. In 1829, Baltimore reportedly led 11 Missouri families (including both free and enslaved persons) across the Mississippi to freedom. Later, a “series of group escapes in 1845,” LaRoche notes, caused considerable consternation among Missouri slaveholders, who seethed that abolitionists had enticed their slaves to escape. Yet another potential stampede dates from 1854, when a free black coachman from Alton concealed 15 Missouri slaves in his carriage. He helped them cross the Mississippi in skiffs, and then sent them on to Chicago. [4]

As a child, Henry Highland Garnet escaped slavery in a potential slave stampede. (House Divided Project)

Accounts of other potential stampedes abound throughout the book. Josiah Henson escaped from slavery in Kentucky, traveling to Indiana and eventually Canada, but returned to help lead 30 Bourbon County, Kentucky slaves to freedom. Years later, during the Civil War, eight Kentucky slaves followed in Henson’s footsteps, escaping northward into Indiana. One was recaptured, but the remaining seven managed to reach freedom and enlist in the 28th U.S. Colored Troops. LaRoche also discusses potential stampedes from the eastern slaveholding states. One involved the noted black abolitionist and preacher Henry Highland Garnet, who escaped slavery as a child in 1824, along with 10 enslaved relatives. The group left New Market, Maryland, and reached the Delaware home of Quaker abolitionist Thomas Garrett, and from there moved on to upstate New York. Another potential stampede dates from 1847, when 13 freedom seekers headed north from Williamsport, Maryland, after learning of their impending sale. Just across the border in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the fugitives linked up with a black operative, George Cole, who guided them to the small town of Boiling Springs, where they briefly stayed at the home of white abolitionist Daniel Kaufman. While the fugitives were ushered off to safety, the Pennsylvania abolitionist was later convicted of aiding their escape. [5]

In terms of this project, The Geography of Resistance adds valuable insight to our understanding of slave stampedes. In discussing group escapes, LaRoche highlights the often neglected roles played by free African Americans living along the North-South border. Over the span of several decades, free black residents of Rocky Fork, Illinois, assisted large groups of enslaved Missourians in their attempts to escape bondage. As we continue our research into slave stampedes, LaRoche’s work reminds us that the border’s free black communities were not simply remote or isolated enclaves, but also potential paths to freedom for groups of escaping slaves.

[1] William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), 67-70, [WEB]; Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 36.

[2] LaRoche, 15, 37, 40-41, 70, 85, 87-88, 101-102, 140.

[3] LaRoche, 22-24, 33-34, 37.

[4] LaRoche, 30, 33-36, 157.

[5] LaRoche, 66-68, 97, 128.

This post will be updated occasionally.

From Glenn David Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation (2012):

“As a result, some blacks made their way down the Peninsula to the sheltering arms of Dunmore’s forces. Talk of a Negro “stampede” led to increased patrols and other measures to prevent a mass exodus of slaves. Masters told their slaves that the British were no friends of the black man and would only sell them to the West Indies, where they would endure much harsher conditions. Nevertheless, despite the increased vigilance of whites, within a week of the proclamation approximately 300 blacks had evaded the patrols and made it behind British lines.” (11)

 “An indescribable panic ensued among the colored population,” the National Anti-Slavery Standard reported as Butler’s men abandoned Hampton. “The streets swarmed with the terrified people.” The Baltimore American correspondent explained that “a stampede of the colored population took place…. Nearly a thousand contraband men, women, and children, must have come in during the last twenty-four hours.” (p. 58)  

NOTE:  Brasher’s source for above reference was Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, July 29, 1861; he also included the 1861 image from Harpers captioned “Stampede of Slaves,” (August 8, 1861).

From Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial (2010):

“As the war progressed and the Union army occupied larger and larger portions of the South, the trickle of runaways became a flood.  ‘Slave labor is disappearing so rapidly,’ a member of Maryland’s legislature complained early in 1862, ‘that our lands must go untilled.’  As the navy patrolled the southern coast to enforce the blockade, slaves came to the shore hoping to escape to their ships. Some succeeded in doing so.  When a small Union flotilla sailed up the Stono River in South Carolina in May 1862, the crew observed cavalry pursuing a ‘stampede of slaves’ fleeing to avoid relocation inland.  After opening fire on the Confederate forces and dispersing them, the naval commander took more than seventy slaves on board.” (p. 167)

From William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Volume II (2007):

“As usual in exposed border areas, fugitive slaves lit the first spark.  Especially in Dorchester County, whites experienced the most provocative border scenario: an ongoing series of gang runaways, allegedly provoked by a northern Liberty Line that extended inside the South.  On the Eastern Shore, freedom’s agitators supposedly included free blacks, who taught by their very presence that liberty need not be reserved for whites, and white strangers, who helped slaves flee toward liberty.  The Baltimore Sun reported two results of Dorchester County’s blur of slavery and freedom:

October 31, 1857.  “A Grand Stampede” of Dorchester slaves.  30 escaped, making 44 in two weeks, 15 belonging to one robbed capitalist.  He offers a $3100 reward.

July 31, 1858.  “SLAVE STAMPEDE –There was another slave stampede in Dorchester County, Md. last week.” Seven slaves worth $10,000+ absconded.

Such stampedes could impel owners to sell more slaves to safer Lower South areas.  With more slaves fleeing north, more owners selling slaves south, and more masters offering future freedom to keep slaves toiling, slaveowning capitalism looked to be spinning out of control –and out of Maryland.” (pp. 194-195)

From Brian Gabrial, The Press and Slavery in America (2016):

“Because the initial stories about the raid magnified the crisis and slave participation, they would be sure to raise alarm among the white population. The early headlines used words such as “Riot,”  “Insurrection,” “Stampede of Slaves,” and even “Negro Insurrection” to catch the readers’ attention. The October 17, 1859, Charleston Courier headline, for example, read “Insurrection in Virginia,” and an October 18 New Orleans Daily Picayune said, “Riot at Harper’s Ferry.” In Richmond an October 18 Enquirer headline announced “A Desperate Riot at Harper’s Ferry.” A National Intelligencer headline similarly was “Serious Disturbance at Harper’s Ferry.” In New York readers of the October 18 New York Times learned of “Servile Insurrection” with a “General Stampede of Slaves.” The next day the New York Times referred to Harper’s Ferry as “The Negro Insurrection.” (pp. 206n-207n)

NOTE:  Gabrial also cites:  “Brown’s Slave Stampede,” New York Evening Post, October 19, 1859.

From Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land (2004):

Chapter 7 is entitled, “Stampede of Slaves” (p. 130)

“Despite a harsh crackdown on the personal liberties of free and enslaved blacks, and even nonslaveholding whites, slaves in Dorchester County continued to run away in unprecedented numbers.  Soon national newspapers were running articles mocking Eastern Shore slaveowners, reporting that the “stampedes of slaves” from the area certainly didn’t support [US congressman James] Stewart’s view of their happiness.” (p. 149)

“For Eastern Shore whites, the drama of a “stampede of slaves” out of Dorchester County, as local and national newspapers were wont to describe it during the 1850s, was surpassed only by the Civil War itself.” (p. 151)

NOTE:  Sources include:  “Negro Stampede,” Elkton, MD Cecil Whig, October 31, 1857; “Slave Laws of Maryland,” Washington, DC National Era, March 24, 1859; “Political Intelligence,” Washington, DC National Era, June 30, 1859.

From Kristen T. Oertel, Harriet Tubman (2016):

“Slaveholders on the Eastern Shore sounded the alarm after twenty-eight slaves escaped in just one night from multiple plantations, including fifteen slaves from Samuel Pattison’s estate. One Maryland paper referred to the escapes as a ‘Negro Stampede,’ and local slave catchers mobilized to try and stop the exodus.  They blamed local free blacks for the problem, linking them to ‘”negro worshippers” of the North,’ and anyone in the region who was suspected of harboring runaways risked vigilante justice, like tarring and feathering, and even lynching.  But nothing seemed to stop the stream of runaways, so that by 1859, the national press reported that ‘stampedes of slaves’ had fled the Eastern Shore.” (p. 47)

NOTE:  Primary source quotations come from Kate Clifford Larson’s Tubman biography, Bound for the Promised Land (2004)

From Joseph P. Reidy, Illusions of Emancipation (2019):

“On July 25, Butler abruptly ordered the evacuation of Hampton. Following the federal debacle at Bull Run four days earlier, the War Department had requisitioned 4,000 of Butler’s men to help protect the capital, leaving him little choice but to pull back from Hampton. The departure of the soldiers prompted “a stampede of the colored population,” in the words of a correspondent for the New York Herald. The fear of a Confederate attack and the return to slavery “lent wings to the contrabands,” who grabbed what clothing, household furniture, and effects they could gather and set out over the “long and lonely road” to the wooden bridge that crossed Mill Creek to Old Point Comfort and the fort, their envisioned “haven.” “Never was such an exodus seen before in this country,” the reporter noted.” (p. 172)

NOTE:  Source was “Important from Fortress Monroe,” NewYork Herald, July 29, 1861, 1.

From Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (2008):

“John B. Marchand ventured up the Stono River, ten miles south of Charleston. After steaming upriver for half a dozen miles in the Unadilla (the first of the ninety-day gunboats that Welles had authorized the year before), Marchand was returning toward the open sea when the sound of screams from the riverbank drew the attention of every man on board. Marchand saw “a stampede of slaves on the cotton and corn fields to the south of the river.” (p. 159)

NOTE:  Symond’s primary source was John B. Marchand, Charleston Blockade: The Journals of John B. Marchand, U.S. Navy, 1861-1862 (entry of May 21, 1862), edited by Craig L. Symonds (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1976), 176-77.

From Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom (2019):

“Hundreds of other refugees from Newport News, as well as from the recently evacuated town of Hampton, came to the same realization.  And with that began a new exodus to the fort that was quickly dubbed a ‘stampede’ by an artist for Harper’s Weekly (fig. 2).  In an illustration in the journal’s August 17 issue, men, women, and children can be seen running –literally– in the direction of the fort, clutching baskets of food and sacks of possessions.  The image conveys the urgency of their relocation to Fort Monroe, as well as the large numbers involved: a reported 2,000 arrived at the fort during this late July, early-August migration.” (p. 31)

Joshua Glover, a fugitive slave from St. Louis, was rescued from Federal custody in 1854. (House Divided Project)

On March 10, 1854, a group of slave catchers burst into a rural Wisconsin home and seized a fugitive slave. Their captive, a man named Joshua Glover, had escaped from St. Louis, Missouri two years prior. Detained overnight in a Milwaukee prison, local abolitionists sounded the alarm and by morning Glover had a sizable crowd of supporters anxiously monitoring his fate. As the hours wore on, the crowd decided to take justice into their own hands, launching an all-out assault on the prison door with “planks, axes, &c.” Plowing through, they placed Glover in a carriage and whisked him away to safety. [1]

Yet the case was far from over. Accused of aiding Glover’s escape, Wisconsin abolitionist Sherman Booth was put on trial for violating the controversial Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a case that ultimately worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. While Chief Justice Roger Taney upheld Booth’s conviction, it was clear that there were significant chinks in the law’s armor, especially when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional, a “crowning, if fleeting achievement” for abolitionists. [2]

Wisconsin abolitionist Sherman Booth was tried for his alleged involvement in Glover’s escape. (House Divided Project)

Glover’s escape and Booth’s subsequent trials are among the many cases profiled by legal historian Steven Lubet in his book, Fugitive Justice (2010). Lubet’s book focuses in on three prominent cases involving the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; the trial following the Christiana Riot in September 1851, the rendition of Anthony Burns in 1854, and finally the Oberlin Rescue of 1858, to show the evolution of abolitionist legal tactics during the 1850s. Over the course of the decade, Northern lawyers moved from pointed, technical arguments to moral appeals to a higher law. This tidal shift in legal resistance, Lubet argues, reflected changing attitudes among the Northern public towards slavery. By the late 1850s, abolitionist lawyers were willing to openly challenge the morality of the Fugitive Slave Law as well as slavery itself, an indication, Lubet tells us, of the Northern public’s growing anti-slavery impulse. In doing so, Lubet challenges the principal argument of Stanley Campbell’s book, The Slave Catchers (1970), which held that the Fugitive Slave Law was faithfully and effectively enforced. Through these cases and they way they were adjudicated, Lubet chronicles the mounting public discord against the law. [3]

On September 11, 1851, African-Americans opened fire on Maryland slave owner Edward Gorsuch and his posse, in what is known as the Christiana Riot. (House Divided Project)

The first trial Lubet profiles came in the aftermath of the Christiana Riot in September 1851. The violent encounter actually stemmed from a group escape of four fugitives from the Maryland plantation of slaveholder Edward Gorsuch. Four of Gorsuch’s slaves, Noah Davis, Noah Buley and George and Joshua Hammond, had run away together in November 1849. This could be considered a slave stampede, though Lubet does not use the term. He does, however, speculate on their motives for escape, positing that the bondsmen had been stealing grain from Gorsuch, and perhaps ran away for fear that their theft had been discovered. [4]

Castner Hanway, the key defendant in the Christiana trial, shown here later in life. (House Divided Project)

Nearly two years later, Gorsuch and a posse traveled to Christiana, in southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, expecting to easily seize the fugitives. However, similar to other slave stampedes, the encounter quickly turned violent and took on a revolutionary meaning. Gorsuch’s four fugitives, joined by other local African-Americans, armed themselves and fought back, killing Gorsuch in the fray. Yet the ensuing trial (which is Lubet’s primary focus) did not revolve around who had shot Gorsuch, but rather Castner Hanway, a local miller who had rode to the scene of the conflict shortly before the first blood had been spilt. Among more than 30 others charged with treason for failing to “aid and assist” in recapturing the fugitives, Hanway was the first defendant placed on trial. His chief defense lawyer, Lancaster Congressman and noted abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, made a tight, unprovocative argument for Hanway’s innocence. The strategy worked, and Hanway was acquitted, though his victory was not a repudiation of the law, writes Lubet, but rather a technical argument for the innocence of a specific individual, aided by the shaky credibility of one of the prosecution’s key witnesses. [5]

To considerable fanfare and outrage, fugitive slave Anthony Burns was remanded to slavery from Boston in 1854. (House Divided Project)

Lubet highlights two more cases, though both revolved around individual fugitives rather than group escapes. The first is the rendition of Anthony Burns in 1854, a fugitive slave who was seized in the streets of Boston. In a departure from Stevens’s technical defense, Burns’s defense lawyers argued that U.S. Commissioner Edward G. Loring had “ample room” to “interpret” the law, and rule in Burns’s favor. However, their efforts fell on deaf ears, and Loring declared that Burns was a fugitive and remanded him to slavery. [6]

The next landmark case involved an enslaved man from Kentucky, John Price, who had escaped to Oberlin, Ohio in 1856. He was captured by a slave catcher in 1858, only to be rescued by angry Oberlin residents. Although Price reached safety in Canada, a grand jury subsequently indicted 37 men for violating the Fugitive Slave Law, including 25 students, faculty and alumni of the prominently anti-slavery Oberlin College. In a contrast to both the Christiana and Anthony Burns cases, defense lawyers for the Oberlin activists would present what Lubet calls “the first forthright invocation of higher law in a U.S. Courtroom.” Only two defendants were actually brought to trial, and while both were convicted, their sentences were relatively light, especially that of Charles Langston, a black Oberlin graduate who boldly used his sentencing hearing to give vent to the higher law argument. The judge, Hiram Willson, practically “apologized” to Langston for enforcing the unpopular law, sentencing him to just 20 days in prison and a fine of $100. Lubet terms it “one small victory for the higher law,” asserting that although only partially successful in the courtroom, the higher law argument “helped to create an unbridgeable gap between the free states and the slave power.” [7]

Syracuse abolitionists stormed the second-story office of U.S. Commissioner Joseph Sabine in the first attempt to free Jerry, a Missouri fugitive. (House Divided Project)

Fugitive Justice makes a few references to Missouri escapes, including a brief allusion to John Brown’s December 1858 “raid” into western Missouri that helped free 11 enslaved people. Lubet discusses in considerably more detail the cases of St. Louis fugitive Joshua Glover and an even more famous Missouri runaway, William McHenry, commonly known as “Jerry.” He had escaped from Missouri and made his way to the abolitionist stronghold of Syracuse, New York. There, Jerry seemed to adjust well to freedom, working as a cooper. However, in October 1851 a slave catcher and U.S. marshals seized Jerry and brought him before U.S. Commissioner Joseph Sabine. Syracuse’s abolitionist populace was outraged, and stormed Sabine’s office, and later a jail, in order to free Jerry. While Jerry reached safety in Canada, indictments came down for 26 Syracuse men, resulting in just one conviction. Instead of treason, those involved in the “Jerry Rescue” were only charged with interfering with the law and assault. Lubet speculates that Federal officials were not eager to embark upon another difficult and time-consuming treason case in the “heartland of abolitionism,” where they were unlikely to prevail. [8]

The term slave stampede does not appear in Lubet’s book, nor does the concept of mass escapes. Fugitive Justice primarily covers legal cases that unfolded in Northern courtrooms, documenting the fallout from escapes, rather than the escape effort itself. Still, Lubet offers important insight into how fugitive slaves and their abolitionist allies constructed and evolved their legal defense strategies to align with changing public opinion in the North.

[1]  Milwaukee Sentinel, quoted in, “Great Excitement–Arrest of a Fugitive Slave,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 24, 1854; Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 305-307.

[2] Lubet, 305-307.

[3] Lubet, 2-3, 5-6.

[4] Lubet, 55.

[5] Lubet, 57-64, 77, 91-131.

[6] Lubet, 190, 221-223.

[7] Lubet, 3, 6, 159, 232-239, 245-247, 250-254, 294-298, 327.

[8] Lubet, 86-90, 254, 305-307, 316.

In July of 1841, Illinois abolitionist Alanson Work and two of his students, George Thompson and James Burr “attempted to induce slaves of four different masters in Marion County to leave their owners and travel through Quincy and Chicago to freedom.”

George Thompson (House Divided)

These four enslaved people, presumably wary of the white abolitionists, instead alerted their slaveholders of the abolitionists’ presence. Work, Thompson, and Burr were then arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison—the second longest slave stealing sentence in Missouri history. ^[1]. These three men were not the only abolitionists sent to prison in Missouri for “slave stealing,” the term denoted to describe those who are caught assisting the enslaved in their escape attempts. In Missouri courts, slave stealing was an act of grand larceny, and at least 42 “slave stealers” were imprisoned by Missouri circuit courts between 1837 and 1862.^[2]

Legal scholar Harriet Frazier places this “slave stealing” episode within the larger historical context of centuries of escapes and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the decades leading up to the Civil War in her book Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them (2004). Frazier’s book presents “unique and valuable information” about enslaved and free Blacks living in Missouri in the 18th and 19th centuries as well as the agents and processes of the Underground Railroad. Frazier’s background as a law professor at Central Missouri State University and a licensed attorney provides a unique lens to thoroughly analyze the ways that law, culture, and society shaped the nature of slavery and escapes in Missouri from 1763 to 1865.^[3] The author presents a comprehensive overview of the history, legal system, and people in Missouri that shaped the experiences of the enslaved, as well as actions taken by slaves to assert their agency and achieve freedom. Frazier’s book notes numerous individuals and stories from the historical record that shed insight on the nature of slave stampedes.

Frazier claims that slave stampedes and the public panic surrounding them did not become significant in Missouri until the 1850s, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.^[4] The term “stampede” is used once, in a reference to the Louisiana Journal article entitled “Stampede of Negroes from Lewis County,” which describes the June 1860 escape of 11 enslaved people belonging to seven different slaveholders from Lewis County. Frazier does not comment on the use of the term “stampede,” but she writes that “these accounts of absconding slaves all appeared in Missouri newspapers after the Thirty-First Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850,” suggesting a direct connection between the Fugitive Slave Act and the recognition of slave stampedes in the media.^[5]

Frazier also provides the names and stories of numerous abolitionists living in Missouri in the years leading up to the Civil War. In the fourth chapter, which describes the lives of numerous notable free blacks in the state, the Reverend John Meachum is mentioned again (learn more here). According to Frazier, Meachum’s abolition work primarily consisted of purchasing slaves to train them in professional skills such as carpentry and then free them. He also allegedly taught enslaved and free people of color to read and write in the basement of his church, and then, when the operation was shut down by the police, on a steamboat on the Mississippi River. However, a more complicated portrait of Meachum is revealed in a freedom suit filed against him by an enslaved woman named Judy. The decision was made to grant Judy her freedom, but Meachum’s opposition to Judy’s case throughout the trial paints a “less attractive side of Meachum than the one usually presented.”^[6] Later in the book, Frazier mentions the 1855 arrest of Mary Meachum, John Meachum’s wife, for attempting to help nine slaves across the Mississippi River in their bid for freedom. In 2001, the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing and Rest Area in St. Louis was dedicated to commemorate this event.^[7]

Freedom’s Crossing, a mural at the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing Site. (Kevin McKague)

Another notable case was that of Dr. John Doy, who was already known for his friendship with John Brown, an infamous abolitionists who in 1858 freed 11 enslaved Missourians in a spontaneous raid.^[8] In January of 1859, Dr. Doy and two other men were caught in Kansas by Missouri slaveholders the company of thirteen freedom seekers. Dr. Doy and one of the men with him, his son, were arrested for slave stealing and taken to Platte County, Missouri.

New York Times, “Dr. Doy of Kansas,” March 18, 1859
Click to enlarge. (House Divided)

His case became so well known through newspapers and word of mouth that Doy and his son were kidnapped by an angry mob of Missouri slaveholders and almost lynched while awaiting trial. After numerous retrials, Doy was sentenced to five years in prison. However, on July 23, 1859, ten of his friends broke into the Buchanan County jail at midnight and successfully rescued Doy and returned him to Kansas. Dr. Doy wrote about this entire experience in his memoir, The Thrilling Narrative of Dr. John Doy of Kansas (1860), and continued to claim for the rest of his life that he had nothing to do with the escape of the thirteen slaves.^[9] Most historians, such as Diane Mutti-Burke, dismiss this claim of Doy’s. Whether he did assist the freedom-seekers or not, however, Doy’s experience, and the experiences of other jailed abolitionists, reveal how much anger the pro-slavery population of Missouri felt towards white abolitionists who “stole” their property and stampeded them to freedom.

Dr. John Doy and his rescue party (Kansas Historical Society)

^[1] Harriet C. Frazier, Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them, 1763-1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., 2004), 131-134.

^[2] Frazier, 124, 131.

^[3] “Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them,” Judy Sweets, Kansas History 28:1 (2005), 75.

^[4] Frazier, 101.

^[5] Frazier, 102.

^[6] Frazier, 76-78.

^[7] Frazier, 173.

^[8] Frazier, 145-150.

^[9] Frazier, 154-161.