Abandoned Tracks
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Abandoned Tracks

The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania

W. Thomas Mainwaring

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Abandoned Tracks

The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania

W. Thomas Mainwaring

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About This Book

In Abandoned Tracks, W. Thomas Mainwaring bridges the gap between scholarly and popular perceptions of the Underground Railroad. Historians have long recognized that many aspects of the Underground Railroad have been mythologized by emotion, memory, time, and wishful thinking. Mainwaring's book is a rich, in-depth attempt to separate fact from fiction in one local area, while also contributing to a scholarly discussion of the Underground Railroad by placing Washington County, Pennsylvania, in the national context. Just as the North was not consistent in its perspective on the Civil War and the slavery issue, the Underground Railroad had distinct regional variations. Washington County had a well-organized abolition movement, even though its members helped a comparatively small number of fugitive slaves escape, largely because of the small nearby slave population in what was then western Virginia. Its origins as a slave county make it an interesting case study of the transition from slavery to freedom and of the origins of black and white abolitionism. Abandoned Tracks lends much to the ongoing scholarly debate about the extent, scope, and nature of the Underground Railroad. This book is written both for scholars of abolitionism and the Underground Railroad and for an audience interested in local history.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Twilight of Slavery

SLAVERY AND THE SETTLEMENT OF SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA

The earliest indications of Underground Railroad activity nationally appeared in the 1780s in Philadelphia, where a large Quaker population opposed slavery, a substantial free black community could assist runaway slaves, and influential spokesmen such as Benjamin Franklin headed an antislavery organization. Washington County, on the frontier some three hundred miles to the west, could claim a few Quakers in the 1780s, but the tiny minority of blacks in the county were all enslaved, and the local elite was far more likely to own slaves than to argue that all men were created equal. It would take four decades before conditions were ripe in Washington County for the gestation of the Liberty Line. This chapter analyzes how the roadbed was laid for the Underground Railroad there.
The development of the Underground Railroad in Washington County was profoundly influenced by the early settlement of the region in the decade before the American Revolution. Of primary importance was the fact that a significant number of the county’s first white settlers were slaveholders. No Underground Railroad could operate effectively as long as slavery was an accepted institution locally and the vast majority of blacks in the county was held in bondage. Eventually acute tensions would arise there between the owners of human chattel and the proponents of human freedom who claimed that the American Revolution invalidated the institution of slavery.1
The Ohio Country, as southwestern Pennsylvania was first known, was initially contested by the French and British during the 1750s. The first blacks to arrive in the area accompanied the disastrous Braddock expedition of 1755 and the successful Forbes expedition of 1758, which drove the French out of the area. The vast majority of these black participants were slaves who served as teamsters, drovers, and servants, but at least one, Tom Hyde, was a free soldier.2
The French and Indian War did not end the contest for the Ohio Country. Both Pennsylvania and Virginia claimed the upper Ohio Valley as their own on the basis of their colonial charters. As settlers began streaming into southwestern Pennsylvania in the late 1760s and early 1770s, it was not at all clear which colony’s claims would hold up. Virginia’s claim was particularly strong in the area west of the Alleghenies and south of the Ohio. This dispute was not settled until 1780, when the two states agreed to establish the western boundary of Pennsylvania by extending the Mason-Dixon Line to five degrees west of the Delaware River. Once the western boundary had been settled, Pennsylvania created Washington County in 1781. The county initially included all of current-day Greene County and parts of Allegheny and Beaver Counties.3 (See Map 1.)
Virginians, however, comprised the majority of the county’s early inhabitants. These Virginians had brought slaves with them to what they had called Yohogania County, Virginia.4 Along with a smaller number of slave owners from Maryland and Pennsylvania, they gave what was to be Washington County a high concentration of slaves relative to Pennsylvania. Although no one was apt to confuse Washington County with Virginia’s Tidewater region because of its slaves, about 6 percent of white families in the county owned slaves in 1782, when the first registration of slaves took place. The county’s white population at the time is estimated to have been about 16,000 people, so the 417 slaves in Washington County constituted about 2.5 percent of its population.5 In Pennsylvania as a whole, slaves accounted in 1780 for slightly more than 2 percent of the population—far less than the neighboring states of Delaware (19 percent), New Jersey (7.2 percent), and New York (10 percent).6 The 146 slave-owning families in Washington County in 1782 held an average of about three slaves per family. Slaveholders such as Herbert Wallace of Fallowfield Township, who owned twenty slaves, were quite exceptional. Only six other individuals owned ten or more slaves. Fallowfield Township residents Francis Wallace, John Hopkins, and James Innis owned eleven, ten, and eleven slaves, respectively. William McMahon and John Tinnell, both from Hopewell Township, owned thirteen slaves and eleven slaves, respectively, while John and George Wilson from Strabane Township owned eleven. Nearly half of the county’s slave owners—sixty-three of them—possessed only one slave.7
Map_01
Map 1
Slaveholding in the county was initially concentrated in several townships. (See Map 2.) Half of the county’s slaves lived in the eastern townships along the Monongahela River.8 One of those townships, Fallowfield, featured the most slaveholders (28) as well as the slave owners who owned the largest number of slaves in the county. The residents of this township collectively owned 109 slaves—26 percent of all the slaves in the county. Hopewell Township in the western part of the county was home to 21 owners of a total of 62 slaves. Strabane Township, in the center of the county, was another early stronghold of slavery. There, 19 owners held 52 people in bondage. The town of Washington, which was carved out of Strabane in 1788 and became the county seat, held the vast majority of these slaves. Many of the prominent men of the early town, such as William Hoge and Absalom Baird, owned slaves. Hoge and his brother John permanently influenced racial patterns in Washington by giving their slaves lots in the area of East Walnut Street and North College Street, a neighborhood that remains predominantly black today. Architectural historians believe that one of the cabins built by the former Hoge slaves is still standing today.9
Map_02
Map 2
Despite their relatively small numbers, slave owners exercised disproportionate power and influence in Washington County. The mere fact of owning slaves marked one as a person of some means. In 1775, for example, a slave cost between fifty and seventy-five pounds sterling, the equivalent of a year’s earnings for many artisans.10 More than two-thirds of slave owners were ranked among the wealthiest 10 percent of Washington County’s population.11
The first county elections in 1781 gave Virginians a substantial majority of the county offices, and slaveholders continued in positions of leadership well into the 1790s. For example, David Bradford, of Whiskey Rebellion fame, purchased slaves upon his arrival in the county from Maryland. His nemesis, John Neville, the federal collector of revenue for western Pennsylvania, was a Virginian who owned more than a thousand acres of land and eighteen slaves in 1790. James McFarlane, a Revolutionary War veteran and casualty of the Whiskey Rebellion, also owned bondsmen. Not all of these slaveholders were Southerners. Thomas Scott, the first congressman from the region elected under the Constitution, was a native of Pennsylvania and owned slaves. His fellow Pennsylvanian, Colonel George Morgan, was also reputed to be a slave owner; an Indian agent and Revolutionary War soldier, he owned what is said to have been the largest private estate west of the mountains, Morganza. County historian Earle Forrest appears to have erred, however, in contending that Morgan owned many slaves after he moved to Washington County in 1796 from New Jersey. The 1800 and 1810 censuses do not show Morgan owning any slaves, though the 1810 census does indicate that Morgan had nine free persons unrelated to his family living on his estate. These may well have been African Americans who were working for Morgan as indentured servants or “twenty-eight-year servants”—servants who were bound to work until they reached the age of twenty-eight. If so, it may explain why Forrest believes that there was a slave burial ground on Morgan’s property. Morgan clearly made use of black labor at Morganza, as he advertised the sale of an indentured African American man who had seven years to serve on his indenture in 1814.12
Slavery in Washington County resembled slavery in much of the rest of the northern states where the institution was of marginal importance. Slave labor clearly did not rest on the cultivation of staple crops such as tobacco as it did in the Chesapeake. At least through the end of the American Revolution, settlers in western Pennsylvania struggled for subsistence, and slaves were likely to have been put to work clearing land, planting crops, building houses and barns, and helping to provide other necessities of life. As R. Eugene Harper has observed, the rapid settlement and economic development of western Pennsylvania between 1783 and 1800 meant that agriculture ceased to be the only economic activity, although it remained an important one. The appearance of towns such as Washington, Canonsburg, and Parkinson’s Ferry (later Monongahela) made for a much more diverse occupational structure in which artisans, laborers, millers, lawyers, and other professionals had a niche. Slavery continued to exist in Washington County not because labor was needed to cultivate large plantations, but rather to provide domestic or farm help. As Harper has commented, the ownership of slaves also conferred status on the owner.13
Slaves in Washington County were sold as property at least through the eighteenth century. Only a few of these transactions were recorded, so it is difficult to arrive at an estimate of the volume of this traffic. Only three slave sales appear in the deed books of the county; there were undoubtedly others that were not recorded. In the first transaction, Alexander McCandless sold a female slave for sixty pounds in 1781. In the second, dated 1784, Samuel Bealer sold “Hen and a Negro child born of said wench named George” to Seshbezzar Bentley for 100 pounds and twenty gallons of “mercantable whiskey.” In the last sale recorded in the deed books, Reason Pumphrey obtained seventy to one hundred pounds apiece for three slaves in 1795.14
Slaves were also bequeathed to wives and other inheritors of property. The inventory of Edward Griffith’s estate, dated May 19, 1778, reads in part as follows:
A Negro Woman named Sall88 pounds
A Negro Garl named Esther64 pounds
A Negro Garl named Siddis54 pounds
A Negro Boy named Harry54 pounds
The presumption of white Washington County in the late 1700s was that any black person was in fact a slave. It was probably for this reason that a “Negro man named Yara” went to the county court to have a paper issued certifying that he was “free and as such may be employed by any person.”15

THE GRADUAL ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

Two developments changed the prospects of slave owners in Washington County. The first was the agreement signed in 1780 by Pennsylvania and Virginia designating the boundaries between the two states. Although this line was not run until 1785, it soon became clear that Yohogania County, Virginia, would disappear, and that most of the land initially claimed by Virginia north of the Mason-Dixon Line would become a part of Pennsylvania. (In the end, only the panhandle between the Ohio River and the western border of Pennsylvania remained part of Virginia.) In 1781 Washington County effectively supplanted Yohogania County.16
The second development was Pennsylvania’s passage of the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1780. Secured primarily through the efforts of the Quakers, the act—the first of its kind in the United States—technically did not free a single slave. A compromise between humanitarians who wanted to end slavery and slave owners who wanted to keep their property, the abolition law specified that the children born to enslaved mothers after 1780 were to gain their freedom at the age of twenty-eight. (This was the origin of the term twenty-eight-year servants.) Every representative of adjacent Westmoreland County, which at the time included Washington County, voted against the 1780 act. Since Washington County was created after the 1780 act establishing the Pennsylvania–Virginia boundary, a special law had to be passed in 1782 extending the provisions of the abolition act to the county. A subsequent law, passed in 1788, required that slave owners register the children born to slave mothers to ensure that these children were ultimately freed.17
These laws amounted to a death sentence for slavery in the state—but, as Gary Nash has written, it was a death sentence with a “two-generation grace period.” Under the 1780 act, it was entirely conceivable that a slave born before 1780 could have lived a long life and still been a slave in 1847, when Pennsylvania finally abolished slavery outright. Children born to slaves after 1780 could expect to spend the majority of their lives as the servants of a white master. In Washington County, a child born as late as 1817 to a slave for life would not have become a free person until 1845. The 1780 act did, however, have a telling effect on slavery in the state and in the county. After reaching a peak of about 6,855 slaves in 1780, the number of slaves in Pennsylvania fell sharply. In 1790 the state had 3,760 slaves; in 1800, it had 1,706 slaves; and by 1810, there were only 795 slaves left. The number of slaves fell much more rapidly than the operation of the 1780 act alone would have suggested. The act called the legitimacy of the institution into question by openly condemning slavery for depriving blacks of the “common blessings that they by nature were entitled to” and thereby encouraged slaveholders to free their slaves.18 Th...

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