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)
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.
St. Louis authorities thwart another attempted “slave stampede” and accuse three free Black residents of involvement in the escape plot, including Mary Meachum.
[This post is still under construction, more forthcoming in 2023]
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