Harriet Tubman and vigilance activists help free Charles Nalle in another high-profile fugitive slave rescue
Date(s): escaped October 19, 1858; rescued from federal custody April 27, 1860
Location(s): Culpepper County, Virginia; Columbia, Pennsylvania; Troy, New York
Outcome: Freedom
Summary:
Plaque marking the site of Charles Nalle’s rescue (House Divided Project)
Freedom seeker Charles Nalle could not write, so he dictated his correspondence to his employer, a Troy, New York layer named Horace Averill. In the process of taking down Nalle’s letters, Averill came to suspect that Nalle was a fugitive slave and alerted his Virginia slaveholder. Based on Averill’s tip, slave catchers and federal authorities seized Nalle on Friday morning, April 27 and carried him to the downtown office of US Commissioner Miles Beach. There, Commissioner Beach began a hearing under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, but local vigilance forces led by Harriet Tubman (who just happened to be visiting relatives in Troy that day) massed outside the commissioner’s office and threatened to rescue Nalle by force. At the crowd’s urging, Nalle jumped out a second-story window and escaped with help from vigilance activists on the street below. Yet another prominent fugitive slave rescue, the case added to slaveholder’s sense that Northern resistance was getting the better of the federal statute that was supposed to solve the fugitive slave crisis.
Related Sources
- New York Times, “The Slave Rescue at Troy,” May 1, 1860
- Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, NY: W.J. Moses, 1869), 119-128