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]
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]
An Act to Further Protect Personal Liberty, March 24, 1843, FULL TEXT via State Library of Massachusetts
Freedom seeker George Latimer’s arrest prompted the passage of Massachusetts’s 1843 personal liberty law (House Divided Project)
Sec. 1. No judge of any court of record of this Commonwealth, and no justice of the peace, shall hereafter take cognizance or grant a certificate in cases that may arise under the third section of an act of Congress, passed February twelfth, seventeen hundred and ninety-three, and entitled “an Act respecting fugitives from justice and persons escaping from the service of their masters,” to any person who claims any other person as a fugitive slave within the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth.
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)
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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