Underground Railroad Online Handbook

From the National Park Service and Dickinson College

Author: Cooper Wingert Page 2 of 38

(1825) William Grimes, Narrative

By

On October 3, 2022

In Newby-Alexander

Relentlessly pursued by slaveholders, William Grimes pays for his own freedom by writing one of the first slave narratives in US history

Date(s): escaped 1814, self-purchase 1824

Location(s): King George Country, Virginia; Culpepper Virginia; Maryland; Savannah, Georgia; New York; New England; New Haven, Connecticut

Outcome: Freedom

Summary:

Grimes seated wearing tophat holding basket

William Grimes (New Georgia Encyclopedia)

William Grimes was born to a rich slaveholder named Benjamin Grymes and an enslaved woman (left unnamed in his autobiography) on a Virginia plantation. Slaveholders sold and resold Grimes at least ten different times until he ended up in Savannah, Georgia. There, Grimes seized the opportunity to escape when his latest slaveholder, planning a vacation with his family, allowed Grimes to find work on his own during their absence. Instead, Grimes befriended sailors who helped him escape by boat to New York. Once in the North, Grimes found work as a barber, but enjoyed little peace of mind as slaveholders constantly dogged him. The freedom seeker encountered one former slaveholder in New York and promptly moved to Connecticut, only to come face to face with another former enslaver there. Fearing reenslavement, Grimes purchased his own freedom for $500 in 1824. The move plunged Grimes into bankruptcy and pushed him to publish his own story to make ends meet. Some scholars consider the result, Life of William Grimes, The Runaway Slave (1825), to be the first slave narrative published in the United States.

 

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(1826) Levi and Catherine Coffin

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On November 19, 2022

In Baker, Barker, Blackett, Bordewich, Churchill, Crew, Larson, Sinha

Quakers Levi and Catharine Coffin relocate from North Carolina to Indiana, and then to Cincinnati in 1847, assisting hundreds of freedom seekers. The couple’s prolific activism earns Levi the moniker “President of the Underground Railroad.”

[This post is still under construction, more forthcoming in 2023]

(1830) Kentucky Slave Stealing Statute

By

On November 9, 2022

In Baker

Citation

An act to amend the law concerning slaves, January 28, 1830, FULL TEXT via A Digest of the Statute Laws of Kentucky (Frankfort, KY: Albert G. Hodges, 1834), 2:1302-1303

Excerpt

engraving man head

Kentucky authorities convicted abolitionist Calvin Fairbanks under the state’s strict slave stealing statute (House Divided Project)

Sec. 1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, That if any person not having lawful, or color of claim thereto, shall be guilty of seducing or enticing any slave to leave his lawful owner or possessor; and to escape to parts without the limits of the state, to any of the other states, or a foreign county; or shall make, or finish, or aid and assist in making or furnishing a forged pass of freedom, or any other forged paper purporting to be a deed of emancipation, or will, or other instrument, liberating, or purporting to liberate, any slave, or shall in any manner aid or assist such slave in making his escape from such owner or possessor, to another state, or foreign country; every person so offending, shall, on conviction, be sentenced to confinement in the jail and penitentiary of this commonwealth, a period not less than two years, nor more than twenty years. 

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(1831) The Liberator

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On November 9, 2022

In Foner, Grover, Sinha

William Lloyd Garrison founds The Liberator which becomes a leading abolitionist newspaper and an influential voice for immediate abolition and moral suasion for the next three decades.

[This post is still under construction, more forthcoming in 2023]

(1834) Jermain Loguen Escape

By

On November 19, 2022

In Barker, Blackett, Bordewich, Crew, Foner, Jackson, LaRoche, Sinha

Jermain Loguen escapes from Tennessee to Canada and eventually settles in Syracuse, New York, where he openly boasts about aiding freedom seekers and earns a reputation as the “Underground Railroad king.”

[This post is still under construction, more forthcoming in 2023]

(1835) Jack v. Martin

By

On November 9, 2022

In Baker

Citation

Jack. v. Martin, December 1835, FULL TEXT via CaseLaw Access Project

Excerpt

portrait man chest and face

New York chancellor Reuben Walworth declared the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional in the landmark ruling Jack. v. Martin (Historical Society of the New York Courts)

The right of trial by jury is secured to every citizen by the constitution. The act of congress is clearly void so far as it interferes with that right. If congress could legislate at all upon the subject, they should have provided for a trial by jury. Parsons v. Bedford, 4 Peters’ U. S. R. 446. 4 Black. Comm. 350. If it be said that this article of the constitution relates to questions of property, it is answered, the defendant claims Jack as his property, and is estopped from saying that this is not a question of property. Besides, the law considers every case of damages as involving a question of property. The constitution has reference to the probable recovery or amount in controversy. Again: it is a question of property as well as of freedom. A freeman has a property in his own limbs as against him who claims to be the owner of them and to direct their use. They are property because they are capable of producing it. If it be said that the rights of the party claimed to be a slave are not finally settled by the summary proceeding had, and that it is like the case of fugitives from justice, it is answered that there is no analogy in the two cases. In the case of the fugitive from justice, the arrest is for trial where the offence was committed; here there is no provision for further proceedings—no security that the person arrested will be carried where he can have a trial….  This is the very question—slave or traitor to be tried by a jury here. A man sent away as a slave has no means of appealing to a jury of the country as a freeman….

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(1835) New York Committee of Vigilance

By

On November 9, 2022

In Foner, Pinsker

Abolitionist David Ruggles founds the New York Committee of Vigilance, a self-protection society for Black New Yorkers aimed at preventing kidnapping. The group soon expands its mission to include aiding and sheltering freedom seekers. Similar vigilance committees organize across the North, creating a series of interconnected local networks to assist freedom seekers.

[This post is still under construction, more forthcoming in 2023]

(1837) Abolition in Mexico

By

On November 9, 2022

In Baumgartner

Citation

Queda abolida la esclavitud en la República, sin excepcion alguna, April 5, 1837, translated excerpt in Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015), 190

Excerpt

…slavery is hereby abolished, without any exception, throughout the Republic…

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(1837) Maine-Georgia Extradition Controversy

By

On November 9, 2022

In Baker, Sinha

Maine authorities’ refusal to extradite abolitionist sailors who helped a Georgia freedom seeker escape reveals the deepening breakdown of comity between slave and free states

Date(s): escaped May 4, 1837

Location(s): Savannah, Georgia; Maine

Outcome: Reenslavement of Atticus, refusal to extradite Maine sailors

Summary:

Dunlap illustration seated

Maine governor Robert P. Dunlap refused to extradite two Maine sailors to face slave stealing charges in Georgia (Digital Maine)

In May 1837, an enslaved carpenter named Atticus crafted his own way to freedom aboard the vessel Susan. Owned and operated by Maine sailors, the Susan (also known as the Boston) was lying in port in Savannah, Georgia for repairs. The Mainers hired Savannah carpenter and slaveholder James Sagurs to finish repairs to the ship, and Sagurs brought Atticus along to work. Knowing the Susan would set sail on May 4, Atticus stowed away on board. Once the Susan reached Maine, Captain Daniel Philbrook and Edward Kelleran assisted the freedom seeker. But other local men, learning of the reward Sagurs had offered for Atticus’s recapture, seized the freedom seeker and sent him back into slavery by boat. But the case was far from over. Georgia governor William Schley demanded the extradition of Philbrook and Kelleran to face slave stealing charges in Georgia. Maine governor Robert Pinckney Dunlap refused to extradite the two sailors, and Maine’s legislature continued to stand its grown as late as 1841, four years after Atticus’s escape. The case was a sign of the deepening breakdown of comity between slave and free states and foreshadowed a similar confrontation over extraditions sailors between Virginia authorities and New York governor William Seward in 1839.

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Related Essays

(1837) Philadelphia Vigilance Committee

By

On November 9, 2022

In Blackett, Foner, Grover, Harrold, Larson, Pinsker

Philadelphia abolitionists organize their own vigilance committee in August modeled after Ruggles’s New York organization. Initially led by Black activist Robert Purvis, the group goes underground for much of the 1840s before returning to the public eye under the leadership of Black abolitionist William Still in 1852.

[This post is still under construction, more forthcoming in 2023]

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