Missouri Republican, August 30, 1854, p. 3 (State Historical Society of Missouri)

On August 30, 1854, the Daily Missouri Republican responded to a rash of slave escapes in St. Louis by publishing a sensationalized story about the “Underground Railroad” and its supposedly well-organized network of abolitionists who were engaged in “negro-stealing,” as the leading Democratic journal bitterly put it. According to historian Larry Gara, this exposé then set off a furious back-and-forth between pro- and anti-slavery newspapers in the city, a debate that highlighted the polarizing nature of slave escapes.[1]

Larry Gara’s pioneering book, The Liberty Line (1961) uses propaganda battles like the one among St. Louis newspapers in the summer of 1854 to help explain the origins of some myths about the Underground Railroad. Gara was one of the first scholars to expose some descriptions of the Underground Railroad as folklore. His work claims that the Underground Railroad was more localized than its national romantic legend and that escapes from slavery were far more spontaneous and self-motivated than any kind of by-product of organized help from white abolitionists.[2]

“Liberty Line” illustration originally from The Western Citizen, July 13, 1844

Gara uses the term  “stampede” or its variants at least twice in his work, once when describing how “there were veritable epidemics of slave escapes from time to time,” adding, “Southern papers referred to group escapes as stampedes.” [3]  The second time, Gara provides a revealing paraphrase from Wendell Phillips, when the controversial Boston abolitionist denied any responsibility for John Brown’s 1859 raid because (in Gara’s words), “he had always discouraged and discountenanced the idea of stampeding slaves.” [4] In addition, Gara’s text occasionally refers to various group or mass escapes without explicitly labeling them as stampedes.

Richmond Enquirer, December 30, 1859 (Chronicling America)

Gara often focuses on such group escapes when attempting to debunk popular myths that portray Quakers as the main actors helping fugitive slaves; Gara’s description of an 1856 family escape from Kentucky highlights a different reality.  In 1856, a former slave living in Ohio returned to Kentucky to help guide his enslaved wife and children north to freedom. The former slave led his family and three others to freedom without encountering any help until reaching the free state of Indiana. In Indiana, the group finally met Quakers who fed them, gave them money, and forwarded them along the underground railroad. Despite this help, the fugitives were clearly on their own for the most dangerous part of their journey. [5]

The Liberty Line focuses on restoring black agency when describing the nature of fugitive slave escapes. In the years since the publication of this landmark work in 1961, there have been many other works that have also emphasized the agency of both enslaved and free blacks.  One goal of this project on slave stampedes will surely be to continue to seek out such examples and evidence of black resistance, organization, and power in the process of securing freedom.

[1] Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington, Kentucky:  University of Kentucky Press, 1961), 157.

[2] Jennifer Schuessler, “Words From the Past Illuminate a Station on the Way to Freedom,”  New York Times, January 14, 2015, [WEB] 

[3] Gara, 22. 

[4] Gara, 88.  Gara cites this claim by Phillips to the Richmond Enquirer, December 30, 1859.

[5] Gara, 59.

“Slave Stampede,” Daily Missouri Republican, July 16, 1856, p. 3 Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

On July 16, 1856, the Daily Missouri Republican reported on a large reward being offered to help recapture a group freedom seekers: “Slave Stampede: A reward of $1,500 was offered yesterday for the apprehension of eight negroes-a man and wife, three sons, two daughters and the wife’s sister, who disappeared on Monday night. They are the property of Messrs R. Wash and John O’Fallon Jr. Several other slaves are supposed to be in their company on the underground track.”^[1] This short article, located in the middle of four pages of local and national news, described a group escape of eight or more enslaved blacks as a “stampede.” Yet what does the term mean in this context? Was it meant to sensationalize the news to grab readers’ attention? Or was it designed as a way to dehumanize enslaved people by comparing them to a hoard of wild animals?

Lea VanderVelde, a noted legal historian from the University of Iowa School of Law, attempts to answer these questions and many others in two recent books, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (2009) and Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom Before Dred Scott (2014). The former is a biography of Harriet Scott that examines her life as a slave and as an often-overlooked plaintiff behind the infamous Scott v Sandford decision. The latter study is a review of around 300 original court case files for freedom suits from the circuit courts of St. Louis, Missouri. All of these cases, described by the author as “songs of freedom,” can be viewed online here.^[2] Most of these suits involved claims of enslaved people being held illegally in bondage in either free territories or states, often by slaveholders, such as army officers (in the case of the Scott family) who traveled widely. In both studies, VanderVelde reveals valuable information not only about the nature of freedom suits, but also about the dynamics of group slave escapes in 19th century Missouri.

For example, VanderVelde mentions the July 1856 stampede of eight in a footnote to Redemption Songs (2014) as way to help elaborate on her use of the term “stampede.”^[3] In the text, she writes that “As slaves, petitioners are described by witnesses in a passive voice as having the characteristics of objects…They are stolen, even ‘stampeded,’ by third parties.”^[4] In her work, VanderVelde always emphasizes the agency of the enslaved, but here she seems to suggest that the term “stampede” was used by their oppressors as a way to dehumanize them.

The term “stampede” surfaces in Mrs. Dred Scott (2009) as well, during an exploration of the ramifications of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.  VanderVelde writes, “for the first time [after September 1850], the newspapers noted the new phenomenon of slaves running away in groups. They initially referred to these departures as ‘slave stampedes’ as if the escapees were witless horses.”^[5] Yet such group escapes, or “stampedes,” caused slaveholders great anxiety, because as VanderVelde notes, “this sort of exodus suggests [to them] some prior planning and outside assistance to avoid detection.”^[6]

One exceptional case, the freedom suits of Milton Duty’s 26 slaves, reveals that the concept of “stampedes” might also be applied to the freedom suit process. During his lifetime, Mississippi slaveholder Duty had ensured the manumission of his slaves by moving them to Missouri (with more liberal manumission policies). They lived together for a year in Missouri, where Duty instructed the slaves to rent out their labor in St. Louis in order to start saving money for their new lives free after bondage. When Duty died in 1838, greedy stakeholders, including both creditors and the executor of Duty’s will, immediately went through Duty’s personal items, tearing up and destroying as much evidence of Duty’s intention to free his slaves as possible. Over the following decade, Duty’s slaves were forced to enter a bitter legal battle to seek their freedom.  More than two dozen of them filed for freedom at the same time in St. Louis Circuit Court in 1842. Yet despite the clarity of Duty’s intentions as outlined in his will, and after years of legal struggle, only one of the twenty six slaves was eventually granted freedom. Jesse, the drayman, won his case based in part on his ownership of Duty’s horses. By the time the petition was officially rejected by the Missouri Supreme Court in 1846, several of the original slaves who filed had already died. The story of Duty’s slaves reveals the struggles and obstacles faced by enslaved folks who chose to fight for their freedom legally rather than escaping.^[7]

VanderVelde’s work also suggests that whether escaping or petitioning, an important element of enslaved agency was about gender and family. In Redemption Songs (2014), she writes that far more women than men filed for freedom in court. “Most St. Louis freedom suits were initiated by women,” she observes, “Filing suit kept mothers and children together.”^[8] Legally, the status of slavery was passed through the mother to children. If the mother’s status changed from enslaved to free, then her children would also become free. This meant that enslaved women had much more incentive than men to take the effort to legally change their status rather than risk family separation in escape. This concept that “men run, [and] women sue” reveals a specific way in which gender, race, and conceptions about motherhood intersected to create unique experiences for enslaved women, and explains one reason why some slaves chose to sue for their freedom.^[9]

Freedom suits, much more than escapes, “preserved the status quo.”^[10] Many successful petitioners didn’t move away even after winning their cases.  Winny, an enslaved woman who won her case, spent the rest of her days in freedom as a washerwoman in St. Louis.^[11] Dred and Harriet Scott, who eventually achieved freedom through manumission, also continued their free lives in St. Louis, where Dred worked as a doorman at Barnum’s Hotel.^[12]

A statue of Harriet and Dred Scott outside the St. Louis courthouse where they first filed for freedom in 1846 (Dred Scott Heritage Foundation)

A second likely reason that some eligible slaves chose to sue for freedom over escaping was the simple fact that until the Scott case (Scott v. Emerson in the Missouri Supreme Court in 1852 and then Scott v. Sandford in the US Supreme Court in 1857), slaves had a genuine chance at freedom through legal means. In the years leading up to the final Dred Scott decision, St. Louis courts had set a precedent that often surprisingly favored the petitioner in freedom suits. In 1824, this Missouri statue established that if a court reached a “judgment of liberation,” for a petitioner, then that individual was deemed wholly free, even if that judgment directly opposed the wishes of the slaveholder. Of the 300 original court filings from St. Louis that VanderVelde examined, over 100 litigants were granted their freedom.^[13]

Still, slaves took on great risk to their lives and livelihoods by making any type of bid for freedom in a system that tried to strip them of their humanity. Both freedom suits and escapes were dangerous acts of bravery that undermined the institution of slavery. They were especially so, because as VanderVelde writes, “survival is a much more significant objective in influencing human behavior than attaining freedom.”^[14]  What we hope to uncover, however, is how a family of eight, running away together on a July evening in 1856, might have seen their “stampede” as both an act of personal and political survival.

^[1] “Slave Stampede,” Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, MO), July 16, 1856. [WEB]

^[2] Lea VanderVelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom Before Dred Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 22.

^[3] VanderVelde, 263n.

^[4] VanderVelde, 203.

^[5] Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 287.

^[6] VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott, 287.

^[7] VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 159-176.

^[8] VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 195.

^[9] VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 195.

^[10] VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 195.

^[11] VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 65.

^[12] VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott, 322.

^[13] VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 20.

^[14] VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 194.

Freedom seekers fire upon a posse of whites at Christiana, Pennsylvania in September 1851. (House Divided Project)

Armed with “pistols and tomahawks,” a group of 10 freedom seekers refused to surrender to their white pursuers. It was late May 1845, and they had been overtaken by 8 white men near Smithsburg, Maryland. Ordered to halt, the freedom seekers instead “drew themselves up in battle order,” and “immediately commenced an attack upon the whites, felling several of them to the earth.” What followed was a “desperate contest,” in which two enslaved people were recaptured, and three white men were severely wounded. Bloodied but still defiant, the remaining freedom seekers continued northward towards freedom. [1] 

This and numerous other bloody episodes are recounted in Stanley Harrold’s invaluable book, Border War (2010). As its title suggests, Harrold’s work chronicles the struggles over slavery along the North-South border in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Harrold contends that disputes over slavery were magnified in these contentious border regions, where the possibility of escapes was the highest. He recites a long string of armed conflicts between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces that escalated to a fever pitch by the 1850s. Harrold argues that these violent borderland encounters spurred on the secessionist movement much farther away, asserting that “fear in the Lower South of losing the Border South was a major cause of the Civil War.” [2]

For the scope of this project, Harrold’s focus on armed conflict is especially important. Not only does he dismantle the stereotype of passive, non-violent abolitionists, but he applies the same lens to escaping slaves, whom he insists were far from “peaceful.” Freedom seekers, he adds, “often carried weapons and fought masters who pursued them.” [3]

Wartime image depicting a freedom seeker resisting a white slaveholder. (House Divided Project)

In reframing escaping slaves as aggressive actors, Harrold makes an important contribution to our understanding of slave stampedes, even though he generally avoids the term. Still, Harrold documents multiple “mass-escapes,” which he notes “could appear much like [a] revolt,” and often ended in bloodshed. The first case he mentions comprised a group of 70-80 enslaved men from southern Maryland, partially armed, who defiantly headed northward in July 1845. They were eventually overtaken by a large posse of over 300 whites, who quickly shot and wounded nine of the escaped slaves and recaptured the remaining freedom seekers. While only two slaves faced legal consequences (including one freedom seeker who was sentenced to death), most were sold to the Deep South as punishment for their involvement. [4]

Harrold continues by detailing a similar escape in Kentucky in 1848, which involved anywhere from 40-70 enslaved men, fully equipped with “guns, pistols, knives and other warlike weapons.” The freedom seekers “fortified” their overnight encampment near the Ohio River, where they were ultimately attacked in what was described by newspaper reports as a “battle,” that resulted in the death of one enslaved man and one white man. Surrounded, the freedom seekers surrendered, but in this instance Kentucky officials brought over 40 of the escapees to trial. A white college student who had accompanied them was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor at the state penitentiary, while three slaves identified as leaders in the effort were convicted and hanged. Most, however, would be returned to their slaveholders, who could dole out punishment as they saw fit. [5]

Yet what Harrold describes as the “most influential mass-escape attempt” occurred in the shadow of the nation’s capitol in April 1848. Orchestrated by abolitionist newspaperman William L. Chaplin and a free black man named Daniel Bell, the pair arranged for 77 slaves in Washington, D.C. to board a boat which they had chartered and sail down the Potomac River toward freedom. However, the party encountered winds and was soon overtaken by a pursuing ship and easily recaptured. Known as the Pearl escape (after the name of the escapees’ vessel), the incident became an instant political lightning rod, infuriating pro-slavery politicians. [6]

Future congressman Thomas Lilbourne Anderson decried the effects of slave stampedes at an 1853 anti-abolition meeting in Palmyra, MO. (Library of Congress)

Border War‘s coverage of Missouri is relatively light, though Harrold does reference an important pro-slavery meeting held at Palmyra in Marion County, near the Illinois border. The gathering came on the heels of a recent stampede, in which around 11 enslaved people had escaped from Marion County across the border into Illinois. A local Missouri politician, Thomas L. Anderson, accused abolitionists of orchestrating the stampede and others like it.  Using rhetoric that underscored the chilling effect such escapes, Anderson estimated that stampedes cost fellow slaveholders “eight or ten thousand dollars worth” of enslaved property “at a time.” [7]

While mass escapes and their often violent nature are clearly a recurring concept in Border War, the actual term “slave stampede” appears just twice. In one instance, he uses the term to refer to the mass escapes which became increasingly common in the early 1850s, briefly noting examples in Maryland and Kentucky, as well as a group of some 70 freedom seekers who made their way through Illinois in August 1853. Later in the book, Harrold quotes a Baltimore editorialist, writing in the midst of the “Secession Winter” of 1860-1861, who cautioned that Maryland’s border state status made leaving the Union a particularly precarious prospect. If the state seceded, he predicted, “then will commence the stampede” which would effectively end slavery in “less than six months.” [8] As a whole, however, Harrold’s book adds immense value to our understanding of slave stampedes, demonstrating that mass escapes were frequently violent, and often took on a revolutionary meaning. 

[1] “Runaway Negroes–A Battle with the Whites,” Boston Daily Atlas, June 2, 1845.

[2] Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting Over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 1-13.

[3] Harrold, 14.

[4] Harrold, 36, 129-131.

[5] Harrold, 131.

[6] Harrold, 131-133.

[7] Harrold, 161-162; Benjamin G. Merkel, “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders, 1840-1860,” Missouri Historical Review 37:3 (April 1943): 278, [WEB].

[8] Harrold, 145-146, 199.

Sydney Howard Gay, courtesy of Columbia University Libraries

The Record of Fugitives, a journal kept by abolitionist newspaperman Sydney Howard Gay, was a secret record detailing the escapes of over 200 enslaved people who passed through New York City during their flight to freedom. [1] This remarkable primary source and the fascinating stories it contains remained largely unknown and unexamined by historians until Eric Foner finally analyzed the document in detail for Gateway to Freedom (2015), his recent capstone study of the Underground Railroad.  Gay’s journal reveals a number of insights, including important ones about the frequency of group escapes.  Foner writes that “while the popular image of the Underground Railroad tends to focus more on lone fugitives making their way North on foot, in fact more slaves who passed through New York in the mid-1850s escaped in groups than on their own.” [2]

Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Fiery Trial, focuses on the Underground Railroad in New York City in the 1840s and 1850s but his work has national implications. In particular, the Record of Fugitives includes valuable information about slave stampedes that traveled through New York.  In Gateway to Freedom (2015), Foner uses the word “stampede” twice in reference to group escapes. In 1857, he writes, “a newspaper reported a ‘general stampede,’ (as the press called group escapes) from Dover, the state capital, ‘by the underground railroad.’” [3] Here, Foner is explicitly describing the term “stampede” as used by the antebellum press. He also employs the term later on his own when describing a number of stampedes out of Chestertown, Maryland, which was “particularly vulnerable to mass escapes.” [4] Within only two months in 1855, at least three groups of seven or more individuals are reported by the local newspaper to have successfully escaped from Chestertown. Foner writes that “Not surprisingly, these ‘stampedes’ alarmed Chestertown slaveowners,” asserting a direct connection between mass escapes and slaveholders’ anxiety over the fugitive slave crisis, an anxiety heavily reinforced by the press. [5]

Throughout the book, there are at least twelve cases of group escape depicted for the 1840s and 1850s. For example, Foner writes of the well-known 1848 attempted escape of 76 individuals on the schooner Pearl. This escape from Washington, DC was “particularly alarming to slaveholders” in the enormous number of escapees and the level of planning required to execute the escape. [7] Other examples of stampedes, such as the 35 enslaved people who fled from a single county in Maryland on a single day in 1850, are used to emphasize the anxiety that slaveholders felt about stampedes. [8]

However, Foner does spend some time analyzing certain group escapes themselves, and makes some valuable claims for this project. For example, he writes that ”when slaves escaped in groups, these frequently included relatives—husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, even, as in the case of eleven women or married couples and one man in Gay’s records, small children.” [9] Additionally, Foner’s analysis of how group escapes occurred reveals the instrumental role that the Underground Railroad and its agents played in stampedes. Every group escape documented by Foner involved at least one antislavery agent who housed, fed, or directed the group to safety.

Harriet Tubman, courtesy of the National Women’s History Museum

Harriet Tubman directed one of the most dramatic examples of such group escapes pulled from the Record of Fugitives.  In 1856, Tubman and four escapees fled from the Eastern Shore of Maryland by foot. After being forced to hide from the slaveholders in a “potato hole” for a week, Tubman tapped into the Underground Railroad network to help get the four enslaved men to safety in Wilmington, Delaware. Then, with the help of vigilance committee operative William Still, the group took a train from Philadelphia to New York, where they were placed under the protection of Gay. From there the slaves were sent to Syracuse and then Canada. [10] Without the Underground Railroad and its many known and unknown agents willing to take the enormous risk of traveling with large groups of fugitives, slave stampedes would never have been possible.

————————————————————————————————

[1] Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom, The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), 10.

[2] Foner, 122.

[3] Foner, 229-230.

[4] Foner, 156.

[5] Foner, 206.

[6] Foner, 206.

[7] Foner, 205.

[8] Foner, 116.

[9] Foner, 200.

[10] Foner, 191-192.

Fugitive slaves entering Union lines, July 1864. (House Divided Project)

By 1862, white Missourians were deeply unsettled. The state’s enslaved population, a key source of labor, was rapidly disappearing. “All the negroes in this country will run off,” Missouri farmer Willard Mendenhall scribbled in his diary in late October 1862. “They go in droves every night.” [1]

Although Mendenhall uses a different word, he was referring to slave stampedes, or group escapes, which by 1862 were eroding slavery throughout much of the border South. Mendenhall’s account is one of many featured in Diane Mutti Burke’s recent book on Missouri slavery, On Slavery’s Border (2010). In her book, Mutti Burke addresses the perception that border state bondage was somehow “milder” than that experienced in the Deep South. On average, Missouri slaveholders owned smaller farms and fewer enslaved people than enslavers in other slave states. As a result, Missouri slavery assumed a more “intimate” nature, in which slaveholders and enslaved people interacted more frequently. Citing these factors, many Missourians compared themselves favorably to plantation slaveholders further south. However, Mutti Burke dismisses their claims as “more rhetorical” than realistic. The increased interactions between slaveholder and slave, she argues, “more often than not… fostered enmity rather than empathy,” and created more opportunities for physical, mental and verbal abuse. [2]

The actual term slave stampede appears just once in Mutti Burke’s tome, in reference to a “veritable ‘stampede’ of slaves leaving their owners” by the summer of 1863. However, the concept of group escapes, particularly those triggered by the presence of nearby Union forces, appears repeatedly. She notes that “slave men, women, and children flocked to the nearest military encampments seeking their freedom.” She also recounts a number of escaped slaves who returned to their plantations or farms, sometimes with the aid of Union soldiers, to free other family members. Drawing on Mendenhall’s diary, she recounts the story of one enslaved man, named Bob, who returned to a Saline County farm with “a squad of white men… and took his wife and two children away,” along with two of his slaveholder’s horses. [3]

“The Great Slave Stampede in Missouri,” an article referencing the group escape of Lewis County slaves, that ended in bloodshed. (North American and United States Gazette, November 22, 1849)

While she discusses group escapes primarily in the context of the Civil War, Mutti Burke also references one notable antebellum stampede. In November 1849, a group of over 30 Lewis County slaves armed themselves and headed northward, but the escape attempt ended in a clash with slaveholders, leaving one enslaved man dead. However, Mutti Burke treats the incident more as an attempted slave insurrection, and does not use the word stampede, although period newspapers referred to it as such.  She does describe how the 1849 episode led to changes in Missouri state law that were designed to clamp down on the possibility of slave escapes.[4]

She mentions another possible pre-war stampede, a “large group of runaways” who escaped into the Kansas Territory in January 1859, assisted by New York abolitionist Dr. John Doy, who had been influenced by a similar escape undertaken by John Brown. However, Platte County slaveholders tracked down the group and recaptured them, sending Doy to prison for a brief period of time before he was rescued from custody by free soil forces from Kansas. [5] While Mutti Burke’s book is an invaluable resource on Missouri slavery, more work still remains to better understand the frequency, locations and ultimate results of slave stampedes.

[1] Willard Hall Mendenhall Diary entry, October 30, 1862, in Missouri Ordeal 1862-1864: Diaries of Willard Hall Mendenhall, ed. by Margaret Mendenhall Frazier, (Newhall, CA: Carl Boyer, 1985), 84, [WEB].

[2] Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 125, 143, 171-172, 196-197, 305-306.

[3] Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 283-284; Mendenhall Diary entry, November 7, 1862, in Missouri Ordeal, 86, [WEB].

[4] Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 186; “The Great Slave Stampede in Missouri,” Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette, November 22, 1849.

[5] Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 176-177.  See also Kansas Memory.

In May of 1855, nine enslaved people escaped the city of St. Louis, Missouri in a bid for freedom.

Mary Meachum, Courtesy of Wikipedia.org

The plan was for the slaves to be rowed across the Mississippi River to Illinois and then hidden in a wagon destined for Chicago. This escape was not spontaneous, but carefully arranged by the Knights of Liberty, one of many organizations that helped slaves escape from their slaveholders. The identified agents behind this escape plot were Mary Meachum (pictured right), leader of the organization, and Judah Burrows and Isaac Breckenridge, two other free blacks. Unfortunately, St. Louis police found out about the plot and caught up with the fugitive slaves on the riverbank. Little is known about what happened during this confrontation except that “five of the runaways were taken” by the police. Perhaps the other four found freedom, or perhaps they never made it across the river.[1]

So many similar escape stories exist in the historical record, sometimes with more information available and sometimes less. Large gaps of information remain, but historian Richard Blackett describes many of the most revealing episodes in his seminal work, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (2018). Noted historian Eric Foner calls Captive’s Quest, the “most comprehensive account of the workings of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and opposition to it.”[2]

Blackett spent years meticulously researching the history of the antebellum fugitive crisis for The Captive’s Quest for Freedom, even writing in the book’s introduction that “when I began I was a father of four; now I am the proud grandfather of six!”[3]

The sheer volume of Blackett’s research is clear throughout the book, which is organized into chapters based on different border states and the networks of escape that grew from them.

Map of Missouri and Illinois border ca. 1850, courtesy of Cambridge University Press

The chapter that covers escapes from Missouri, “one of the zones of maximum conflict,” mentions dozens of escapes.[4]  Most slaves from Missouri sought freedom in Illinois, crossing the border at least initially into a hostile southern region known as Egypt, and then traveling to more welcoming cities further North such as Chicago.[5] Blackett explains that attempted escapes involving large groups took place much more frequently in border states such as Missouri. He identifies a total of fourteen antebellum cases of group escapes, also known as slave stampedes, from the state of Missouri.[6]

Blackett uses the word “stampede” a total of seven times throughout the book. The term is first introduced in the second chapter, which focused on reactions to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. “Group escapes,” Blackett writes, “or what slaveholders took to calling stampedes…increased substantially, accounting for fully 36 percent of the escapes in the 1850s.”[7] Other than identifying key individuals credited for directing large amounts of slave stampedes, such as Mary Meachum and the Knights of Liberty, Blackett directs more of his focus on the subject towards the public’s reaction to such stampeding efforts. Blackett repeatedly claims throughout the text that it was particularly these mass escapes which caused much of the slaveholders’ discontent in the years before the Civil War, writing that “group escapes also suggested a level of planning and coordination that raised the levels of anxiety among slaveholders.” [8]

Slaveholders’ anxiety was a huge factor in the increasing tensions between North and South, argues Blackett. Because of this, Blackett claims, every single escape, whether successful or not and whether group or individual, had the “potential to create deep political crises in the communities in which it occurred.” [10] Overall, the picture painted by The Captive’s Quest for Freedom reveals a country in deep political and social turmoil, with fugitive slaves and anxiety over slave stampedes at the heart of the crisis.

[1] R.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), 143.

[2] Eric Foner, review of The Captive’s Quest for Freedom, cover, Blackett, Captive’s Quest.

[3] Blackett,  xv.

[4] Blackett, 139.

[5] Blackett, 150.

[6] Blackett, 139.

[7] Blackett, 50.

[8] Blackett, 393.

[9] Blackett, 88-134.

[10] Blackett,  xii.

Effects of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850. (House Divided Project)

Published almost fifty years ago, Stanley Campbell’s The Slave Catchers (1970) has shaped much of our understanding about the fugitive slave crisis. Campbell’s work takes a close look at the enforcement of the controversial Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850. The law was designed to make it easier for Southern slaveholders to reclaim runaway slaves, and empowered federal commissioners to seize alleged fugitives, hold a “summary” hearing and then return them to slavery. In the book, Campbell argues that despite its unpopularity throughout much of the North, the law was faithfully and emphatically enforced. Two statistics that stand out in Campbell’s research are the 332 fugitive slave cases he documents between 1850-1860, and the figure that 82.2 percent of alleged fugitives captured and brought before commissioners were returned to slavery.

In terms of this project, however, Campbell’s book is notable for the omission of the term “slave stampedes.” While he covers several cases that might be considered to meet the criteria of a slave stampede, Campbell does not address it as a broader concept or theme. In describing the 1847 escape of more than a dozen enslaved people from Maryland, Campbell simply records that they “fled their masters and escaped into Pennsylvania,” devoting more attention to the subsequent trial of abolitionist Daniel Kaufman, who was accused of harboring them. He comes closest to using the term in his description of the controversial Margaret Garner case (where eight Kentucky slaves escaped into Ohio), referring to the group as a “slave party.” Fortunately for scholars, Campbell includes an invaluable appendix, documenting all 332 fugitive slave cases his research uncovered. A cursory glance reveals evidence of at least 10 mass escapes or potential slave stampedes between 1850-1860, though most went unmentioned in the main body of text. [1]

Boston Daily Advertiser, April 4, 1861.

For the purposes of this project, it is also worth noting that much of Campbell’s research focuses on the eastern seaboard, primarily in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. His coverage of the midwestern states is noticeably less thorough, though he does describe one important group escape from Missouri in April 1861. Four freedom seekers–a man named Onesimus Harris, his wife and two children–escaped from St. Louis County, and journeyed as far north as Chicago before being captured. The family was then taken to Lincoln’s own Springfield, less than two weeks before the first shots of the Civil War were fired. In Springfield, they appeared before U.S. Commissioner Stephen A. Corneau, who declared the family to be slaves and remanded them back to bondage in Missouri. [2] When the Chicago Tribune first reported on this episode in early 1861, the anti-slavery newspaper claimed that the arrest (under a Republican administration) was producing “a general stampede” of black residents from the city.  The text of the article (which Campbell does not cite or quote), reads:  “There was immediately a general stampede of fugitive slaves harbored and residing in this city and within a day or two hundreds of them will have left for Canada.” [3]  While Campbell’s work remains a milestone in the historical understanding of the law and its enforcement, this project aims to place new emphasis on slave stampedes that have too often been overlooked.

[1] Stanley Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 12-13, 123-124, 144, 199-207.

[2] Campbell, The Slave Catchers, 188; Chicago Post, quoted in “Great Negro Excitement!,” The Liberator, April 26, 1861.

[3] Chicago Tribune, “Onesimus and His Family Sent Back,” April 4, 1861 [Newspapers.com]