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]
Date(s): escaped 1838
Location(s): Eastern Shore, Maryland; Baltimore, Maryland; New York, New York; New Bedford, Massachusetts
Outcome: Freedom
Summary:
Frederick Douglass (House Divided Project)
Frederick Bailey’s (later Douglass) enslaver allowed him to hire his time out in Baltimore. That meant Douglass could find his own work, but had to hand over his wages to enslaver Hugh Auld. Douglass did not relish handing over most or all of his hard-earned pay, but hiring out had its advantages. Mainly, it afforded enslaved people like Douglass opportunities to make connections with free African Americans, and even plot their escapes. After Douglass had had a dispute with Auld over the arrangement, Douglass did exactly that. Many enslaved people borrowed free papers from free African American allies, but Douglass did not fit any of his free friends’ physical descriptions. Instead, Douglass borrowed his friend’s sailors’ protection papers, even though the physical description was not a perfect match to Douglass’s appearance. He also had help from a free Black woman, Anna Murray, whom Douglass would later marry. Douglass escaped by train and sought to minimize the amount of times the sailor’s protection document was closely examined. A train conductor briefly scanned the false document, but did not notice that the physical description did not match Douglass. When Douglass arrived in New York City in early September, he met David Ruggles, the Black abolitionist who spearheaded the city’s vigilance committee. Ruggles advised him not to stay in New York and encouraged him to travel to New Bedford, Massachusetts. There, Douglass took work as a physical laborer, became a regular reader of the antislavery newspaper The Liberator, and a fixture at antislavery gatherings. In New Bedford, Douglass formally changed his name from Frederick Bailey to Frederick Douglass. As Douglass, the freedom seeker went on to publish his Narrative (1845), the first of three autobiographies, become one of the most famous orators in the country, and arguably the most famous freedom seeker in American history.
Date(s): escaped 1844
Location(s): Lexington, Kentucky; Detroit, Michigan; Canada West; Boston
Outcome: Freedom
Summary:
Lewis Hayden (National Park Service)
Lewis Hayden lost his family to the internal slave trade in the 1830s. Kentucky statesman Henry Clay reportedly sold Hayden’s first wife, Esther Harvey and their son. Fearing that the same fate awaited him, Hayden and his new wife, Harriet Bell, decided to run away. In 1844, the Haydens (Lewis, Harriet, and Harriet’s son from a previous marriage) escaped using a carriage and driver provided by white abolitionists Calvin Fairbank and Delia Webster. The Haydens successfully reached Detroit and later Canada, but Kentucky officials caught up with the two abolitionists and convicted them under the state’s harsh slave-stealing statutes. Neither Fairbank or Webster stopped their Underground Railroad activism, even though Fairbank spent four years and Webster spent two months in prison for assisting the Haydens. Meanwhile, the Haydens relocated to Boston, where they became active members of the city’s antislavery vigilance committee and regularly sheltered freedom seekers in their home at 66 Phillips Street. In 1850, Lewis and Harriet sheltered freedom seekers William and Ellen Craft and threatened to blow up their house if the slave catchers pursuing the couple dared enter. Lewis Hayden also entered politics, winning political patronage as messenger for Massachusetts’s Republican secretary of state and serving a single term in the Massachusetts legislature in 1873.
Harriet Hayden (National Park Service)
Date(s): left Georgia on December 21, 1848, reached Philadelphia on December 25, 1848
Location(s): Macon, Georgia; Philadelphia; Boston; England
Outcome: Freedom
Summary:
Ellen Craft (House Divided Project)
Enslaved couple William and Ellen Craft engineered a plan to deliver themselves (and their future children) from slavery in Georgia. William was unable to pass as white. However, Ellen was only one-quarter Black, and since she was frequently mistaken as a fully white woman, the couple hoped that it would be plausible for Ellen to act as William’s sickly male master while they crossed the Deep South. William gave his wife a more masculine haircut. Ellen immobilized her right arm in a sling and wrapped cloths around her face to avoid having to sign documents or speak. The Crafts traveled north by rail through multiple slave states, managing to avoid detection because of multiple strokes of good fortune. Still, the journey was stressful, and reaching Philadelphia on Christmas morning was the best gift either of the Crafts could have received. The couple moved to Boston under a month later, and settled into jobs as a cabinetmaker and seamstress, respectively. But pressure again began to mount two years later, when a group of slave catchers tracked the Crafts down to the home of Black abolitionists Lewis and Harriet Hayden. The Haydens asserted that they would rather blow their house up than allow the catchers to take the Crafts, and their determination shielded the Crafts until they were able to flee to England. While living in exile from the United States, William and Ellen honed their new literacy (introduced to them by Pennsylvania abolitionists) to publish their story, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860). After the Civil War, the Crafts returned to Reconstruction-era Georgia and opened schools for freedpeople.
William Craft (House Divided Project)
1850 Fugitive Slave Act, September 18, 1850, FULL TEXT via The Avalon Project, Yale Law School
Political cartoon attacking the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law (Library of Congress)
SECTION 7. And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or prevent such claimant, his agent or attorney, or any person or persons lawfully assisting him, her, or them, from arresting such a fugitive from service or labor, either with or without process as aforesaid, or shall rescue, or attempt to rescue, such fugitive from service or labor, from the custody of such claimant, his or her agent or attorney, or other person or persons lawfully assisting as aforesaid, when so arrested, pursuant to the authority herein given and declared; or shall aid, abet, or assist such person so owing service or labor as aforesaid, directly or indirectly, to escape from such claimant, his agent or attorney, or other person or persons legally authorized as aforesaid; or shall harbor or conceal such fugitive, so as to prevent the discovery and arrest of such person, after notice or knowledge of the fact that such person was a fugitive from service or labor as aforesaid, shall, for either of said offences, be subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months, by indictment and conviction before the District Court of the United States for the district in which such offence may have been committed, or before the proper court of criminal jurisdiction, if committed within any one of the organized Territories of the United States; and shall moreover forfeit and pay, by way of civil damages to the party injured by such illegal conduct, the sum of one thousand dollars for each fugitive so lost as aforesaid, to be recovered by action of debt, in any of the District or Territorial Courts aforesaid, within whose jurisdiction the said offence may have been committed.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or Life Among the Lowly (Cleveland, OH: Jewett, 1852), FULL TEXT via Project Gutenberg
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (House Divided Project)
A thousand lives seemed to be concentrated in that one moment to Eliza. Her room opened by a side door to the river. She caught her child, and sprang down the steps towards it. The trader caught a full glimpse of her just as she was disappearing down the bank; and throwing himself from his horse, and calling loudly on Sam and Andy, he was after her like a hound after a deer. In that dizzy moment her feet to her scarce seemed to touch the ground, and a moment brought her to the water’s edge. Right on behind they came; and, nerved with strength such as God gives only to the desperate, with one wild cry and flying leap, she vaulted sheer over the turbid current by the shore, on to the raft of ice beyond. It was a desperate leap—impossible to anything but madness and despair; and Haley, Sam, and Andy, instinctively cried out, and lifted up their hands, as she did it.
The huge green fragment of ice on which she alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it, but she staid there not a moment. With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still another cake; stumbling—leaping—slipping—springing upwards again! Her shoes are gone—her stockings cut from her feet—while blood marked every step; but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank.
“Yer a brave gal, now, whoever ye ar!” said the man, with an oath.
Eliza recognized the voice and face for a man who owned a farm not far from her old home.
“O, Mr. Symmes!—save me—do save me—do hide me!” said Elia.
“Why, what’s this?” said the man. “Why, if ’tan’t Shelby’s gal!”
“My child!—this boy!—he’d sold him! There is his Mas’r,” said she, pointing to the Kentucky shore. “O, Mr. Symmes, you’ve got a little boy!”
“So I have,” said the man, as he roughly, but kindly, drew her up the steep bank. “Besides, you’re a right brave gal. I like grit, wherever I see it.”
When they had gained the top of the bank, the man paused.
“I’d be glad to do something for ye,” said he; “but then there’s nowhar I could take ye. The best I can do is to tell ye to go thar,” said he, pointing to a large white house which stood by itself, off the main street of the village. “Go thar; they’re kind folks. Thar’s no kind o’ danger but they’ll help you,—they’re up to all that sort o’ thing.”
“The Lord bless you!” said Eliza, earnestly.
US troops return freedom seeker Anthony Burns to slavery from Boston on June 2. The federal government’s controversial tactics turn more Northerners against the Fugitive Slave Act. Boston abolitionists later purchase Burns’s freedom, and Burns attends Oberlin College in Ohio before moving to Canada as a preacher.
[This post is still under construction, more forthcoming in 2023]
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