On October 16, 1854, an unidentified slave was caught stealing a boat from the Franklin on his way to Bath, Maine. The slave managed to hide in Gray Head for a few days before Deputy Sheriff Lambert received a warrant for the slave’s arrest for larceny. Sheriff Lambert searched all day for the slave but to no avail. He had not been informed that the slave could have been in the swamp so the idea...
The Autobiography of James L. Smith serves as a potent reminder of the horrific conditions endured by slaves during the years leading up to the Civil War. Smith’s particular narrative gains added import because of the detailed manner in which he exhaustively recounts the daily realities of slave life. However, there are exceptional elements to the narrative as well. The fact that he learned to write...
One of the more striking aspects of the Cameron plantation letters is the account they offer of the exportation of slave life from the areas of initial settlement on the Atlantic seaboard beyond the Appalachian mountains into the old Southwest and the Mississippi. Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone and Generations Of Captivity trace this development to the period of the American Revolution, when British...
In the film The Shawshank Redemption, a convict named Brooks was paroled after 50 years in prison. He was distraught at the thought of having to leave the dehumanizing Shawshank penitentiary that had been his home for so long. Brooks was released and, after a few months of trying to readjust, he gave up and hung himself. Letters written 150 years earlier from the Cameron Plantations reveal a similar...