Freedom at Risk

The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865

Carol Wilson

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184524
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Kidnapping was perhaps the greatest fear of free blacks in pre-Civil War America. Though they may have descended from generations of free-born people or worked to purchase their freedom, free blacks were not able to enjoy the privileges and opportunities of white Americans. They lived with the constant threat of kidnapping and enslavement, against which they had little recourse.

Most kidnapped free blacks were forcibly abducted, but other methods, such as luring victims with job offers or falsely claiming free people as fugitive slaves, were used as well. Kidnapping of blacks was actually facilitated by numerous state laws, as well as the federal fugitive slave laws of 1793 and 1850. Greed motivated kidnappers, who were assured high profits on the sale of their victims. As the internal slave trade increased in the early nineteenth century, so did kidnapping.

If greed provided the motivation for the crime, racism helped it to continue unabated. Victims usually found it extremely difficult to regain their freedom through a legal system that reflected society's racist views, perpetuated a racial double standard, and considered all blacks slaves until proven otherwise. Fortunate was the victim who received assistance, sometimes from government officials, most often from abolitionists. Frequently, however, the black community was forced to protect its own and organized to do so, sometimes by working within the law, sometimes by meeting violence with violence.

Mining newspaper accounts, memoirs, slave narratives, court records, letters, abolitionist society minutes, and government documents, Carol Wilson has provided a needed addition to our picture of free black life in the United States.

CHAPTER ONE

“From Their Free Homes into
Bondage”: The Abduction of
Free Blacks into Slavery

The possibility of being kidnapped and sold into slavery was shared by the entire American free black community, whether young or old, freeborn or freed slave, northerner or southerner. Certainly, however, some were at greater risk than others. Geography may have been the most important factor influencing the degree of risk. Although the practice occurred throughout the nation, residents of the states bordering the Mason-Dixon line were especially vulnerable. The large numbers of free blacks in Delaware, Maryland, and southern Pennsylvania, as well as proximity to the South, probably attracted kidnappers to this area.

Several factors other than geography determined the frequency of kidnapping. Age was another element. Children, presumably because they were easier to abduct than adults, were a favored target of kidnappers. Poverty was a third factor. Impoverished adults, desperate for income, were vulnerable to a kidnapper’s deceptive offer of work. But again, no one was safe from the crime. Even several free blacks among the elite—financially secure and respected in their communities—encountered the specter of kidnapping.

The crime was pervasive partly because of the potential for great profits from a successful kidnapping and sale of a free black into slavery, which made many kidnappers willing to take the risks. In any case, kidnappers may have perceived no great risk, as the racism of the majority of American whites rendered it unlikely that kidnappers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Although kidnapping was a crime in most states, it was a crime committed against blacks and therefore ignored by many whites.

Thus, kidnapping occurred throughout the country. One of the northernmost recorded kidnappings occurred in Sanbornton, New Hampshire, in 1836. The victim was a ten-year-old boy who had been placed with Noah Rollins by the overseers of the poor. For fifty dollars Rollins sold the child to an Alabama man named Bennett. Although the purchaser escaped, Rollins was jailed for kidnapping, and the boy was rescued.¹

Possibly the southernmost known kidnapping occurred in Baton Rouge in 1860. Marguerite S. Fayman, a Creole girl from “people of wealth and prestige,” was kidnapped at age ten. She had been living on a farm where her family raised pelicans, and she had attended a private school run by French nuns. The Sisters often took their young charges for walks around the port of Baton Rouge. Walking along the wharf on the Mississippi River one day, Marguerite became separated from the other children. A man grabbed her, took her aboard a nearby ship, and kept her in a cabin until the vessel sailed for Louisville. She remained a slave in Kentucky until her escape in 1864.²

The vast majority of kidnappings, however, took place not along the nation’s perimeters but in the border states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. As Underground Railroad conductor Levi Coffin remembered, “Free negroes in Pennsylvania were frequently kidnapped or decoyed into these states [Virginia and Maryland], then hurried away to Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and sold.”³ Lawyer and antislavery pamphleteer Jesse Torrey declared in 1818 that it would take a book to record all the incidences of kidnapping that had occurred in Delaware. Two years earlier, Torrey had testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee about the numerous kidnappings in Delaware and Maryland of which he had personal knowledge.⁴

There are several reasons for the primacy of this area. Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland combined had a greater free black population than the rest of the country combined from 1790 to 1860. Especially in the early nineteenth century, when many tobacco farmers in the Upper South began diversifying their crops and manumitting or selling their slaves, the free black populations of these states increased. Cities, particularly Philadelphia, saw a large percentage of this increase.⁵

Proximity to the Mason-Dixon line made it easy to transport victims into the South. Some kidnappers carried their victims southward by land, but many also took advantage of the Delaware River and the network of rivers leading into the Chesapeake Bay.⁶ Moreover, the anonymity of the port cities of Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore facilitated kidnapping.

Kidnappers used a variety of methods. The most obvious means of enslaving a free person was direct, forceful abduction. Kidnappers simply took their victims by incapacitating them or by threatening violence. As earlier indicated, children were especially vulnerable in this regard. Henry Edwards, for example, as a young boy was spirited away by two kidnappers from Newtown, New Jersey, hidden in a wagon. In Bordentown, several miles away, the victim managed to gain the attention of passersby by kicking the wagon’s side. They rescued him and the kidnappers fled.⁷ Two free black men from Illinois were not so fortunate. Forced across the Mississippi River from Cairo by a Missouri gang, one escaped by swimming back across the river. He managed to find his way home, bleeding and “mangled about the head.” As in numerous other cases, what happened to the second victim is unknown.⁸

Deceit was a ubiquitous element in adult kidnappings. Adults were frequently lured into a kidnapper’s company by some pretext, then forcibly restrained and taken into slavery. Some kidnapping victims were attracted by the promise of a job. The case of Solomon Northup, probably the most famous kidnapping case, involved such deception. Northup was a free black man well known in New York state for his skill as a musician. Invited by two white entertainers to join their act, he traveled about the East Coast. Reaching the nation’s capital, he was drugged by his companions and awakened in a slave jail. sold to a dealer, Northup was sent to Louisiana, where he labored as a slave for more than a decade before he could get word to his wife, Anne. She secured the aid of Washington Hunt, the governor of New York, in freeing her husband. En route to his home, Northup and his lawyer stopped in Washington, D.C., and initiated prosecution of the slave trader who had sold Northup to New Orleans. James Burch was acquitted.⁹ But the Cleveland Leader reported in 1854 that it was thought that Northup’s kidnapper (presumably one of the men who had lured him to Washington) had been captured. “If so, let the law deal with the scoundrel in its utmost severity!”¹⁰

The offer of a job was not the only means kidnappers used to lure victims, as antislavery writer Jesse Torrey heard from one of several blacks he discovered chained in an attic in Washington, D.C. (As a slave-trading center, the nation’s capital was an especially threatening spot for people of color.) One of the people he encountered there was a twenty-one-year-old indentured servant, who had been decoyed from his home in Delaware by the prospect of hunting possum with his master. Once he was in the fields, two strangers seized, bound, and threatened him with pistols. Eventually he was taken to Washington and sold, being beaten several times for insisting he was not a slave.¹¹

Blacks as well as whites were guilty of kidnapping. Two especially tragic accounts of kidnappings performed by blacks involved men who lured women with romantic advances. Jesse Torrey described “a monster in human shape,” a Philadelphia man who apparently married black women for the purpose of selling them into slavery. When the city’s black population discovered his treachery, a mob attacked him, but the police saved him from certain death by incarcerating him.¹²

A similar story was that of a woman known only as Lucinda, a young domestic in a small Illinois town about fifty miles from the Missouri border. Formerly a slave in Kentucky, she had “legally secured her freedom.” Lucinda had been seeing a barber in the town, although she had been warned about him. He was described as “a decidedly dandyish fellow” who was believed to be part black, although he claimed to be part Indian. Early one summer, a man who said he was from Maryland arrived in the Illinois town looking for a summer home. “And to those of us who were boys he ‘looked exactly like a southerner,’” recalled resident George Murray McConnel, “but the real southerners by birth who lived in the village smiled, and said he was rather too tropical in style.”¹³

The stranger made Lucinda’s acquaintance and claimed he was a friend of her former master in Kentucky. She was also warned about him, but paid no heed. One day the barber took Lucinda for a drive. When they had not returned by sunset as expected, no one worried, thinking that the barber was proposing marriage. That night, however, an alarm was raised after the barber returned to town alone on horseback. One man said that the wagon in which the two had gone for a ride belonged to the southerner. Three men, including McConnel’s father, confronted the barber, who first claimed that he had returned with Lucinda but changed his story when they threatened him. The barber said that several miles out of town he had gone into the woods for some sassafras root and when he returned, Lucinda and the wagon were gone. He had not notified the police because he thought she had abandoned him, and he was angry with her.¹⁴

Eventually the men caught up with Lucinda and the Marylander several miles outside of town. Others, having heard the story, joined them, and they all returned home, “a little triumphal procession.” Lucinda backed up the barber’s story, saying that she had been kidnapped after her escort went into the woods. No one believed the barber’s innocence, and he left town shortly thereafter.¹⁵

As mentioned earlier, children were particularly vulnerable to kidnapping. Many were enslaved after being hired out by their parents, a common and economically necessary practice in the poor black community. Ira Berlin has argued that many blacks, especially children, were virtually enslaved under apprenticeship agreements. Even worse, these arrangements left children open to actual enslavement when they were sold by an unscrupulous employer.¹⁶ Young Sarah Taylor (or Harrison) was begging in the streets of New York City when she came to the attention of Haley and Anna Howard in 1858. They persuaded her parents to let Sarah go with them to live in Newark, New Jersey, as their servant. Instead, they took the girl to Washington, D.C., where they attempted to sell her for six hundred dollars. When she related her story to the owner of the hotel where they were staying, Sarah won his protection. Sarah’s case was brought to the attention of the mayor of New York City, who had her restored to her family. The Howards (their names turned out to be aliases) fled to Baltimore, but authorities caught up with and arrested them, and Haley Howard eventually served several months in prison for kidnapping.¹⁷

Another case involved six-year-old Peter Still and his eight-year-old brother, Levin, who were kidnapped in the early nineteenth century. Playing at their home near Philadelphia, the boys became concerned as the day wore on and their mother did not return home as expected. Deciding to go to the church to look for her, they accepted a ride with a stranger in a gig. He took them not to their mother but to Versailles, Kentucky. In nearby Lexington, they were taken to their new master’s cook and told, “There is your mother.” The boys were struck when they protested, and they quickly learned not to contradict their owner. They thought about their former home and freedom frequently, however, and although afraid to run away, they hoped to buy their freedom someday. Levin died a slave, but Peter Still eventually purchased his freedom and returned home after about forty years.¹⁸

Children were targets of kidnappers because they were easier to abduct forcibly than adults. William Wells Brown, abolitionist and author, wrote to National Anti-Slavery Standard editor Sydney Gay, apprising him of a kidnapping in Georgetown, Ohio, in 1844. Traveling through the town on his way to Mount Pleasant, Brown encountered “the citizens standing upon the corners of the streets talking as though something had occurred during the night.” They told him that the night before, five or six men had broken into the home of John Wilkinson, beating him and his wife before carrying away their fourteen-year-old son. With the help of neighbors, Wilkinson pursued the kidnappers, who crossed the Ohio River into Virginia. It is not known whether the boy was recovered.¹⁹

If kidnapped at a very early age, a free black child might grow up a slave never knowing that he or she had been born free. Such was the case with Lavinia Bell. She was kidnapped as an infant in Washington, D.C., along with numerous others, by Tom Watson, who was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in the Richmond Penitentiary. Bell learned of her free status from her mistress in Galveston, Texas, where she was brutally abused. After numerous attempts, Bell eventually escaped to Montreal, where her story was recorded.²⁰

Another vulnerable group was blacks held as contraband during the Civil War. Legally slaves, they had been freed in effect by advancing Union troops, yet they existed in a legal limbo between free and slave status, a very precarious position. As nonslaves, they had no masters to protect them, but not being free they did not enjoy protection of the law. They were at the mercy of the Union soldiers, some of whom found selling them an easy way to make money.

Blacks held as contraband faced danger from soldiers of both sides during the Civil War. The abduction of sixteen-year-old Charles Amos and his younger cousin was not unusual. The two had hired out as servants to officers of the Forty-second Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, traveling with them to Galveston, Texas, late in 1862. After Confederate forces recaptured the town on the first day of the new year, the invaders sold Amos and his cousin into slavery.²¹

Cavalry units of the Army of Northern Virginia also kidnapped blacks, both slave and free, during the Pennsylvania campaign in June of 1863. By some accounts, this practice affected large numbers of black residents of southern part of the state. Edwin Coddington, author of a study of the Gettysburg campaign, claimed that “thousands” of free blacks fled the Cumberland Valley into Harrisburg seeking refuge from the troops. At least fifty Pennsylvania blacks were sent into slavery as a result of the campaign.²²

While the kidnapping of blacks by Confederate soldiers is not surprising, their northern counterparts were guilty of the same crime. The activities of the Ninety-ninth Regiment, New York Volunteers, stationed near Deep Creek, Virginia, provide one illustration. Residents there had been ...