In 1848, Ellen Craft transcended racial, gender, and intellectual hurdles, in order to escape slavery in Macon, Georgia and experience freedom in Boston, Massachusetts. Craft’s physical appearance aided her and her husband in their escape because “notwithstanding my wife being of African extraction on her mother’s side, she is almost white.” On December 21, Craft donned the disguise of a...
Sometime in the year 1840, William Green decided that he had enough of being a slave. “White people seem to act as if God made us to be their servants and it is not right for them to keep us in slavery,” he wrote. “I decided I spent enough time in slavery as I was willing to,” he wrote. William had never been whipped but his new master, Dr. Jenkins, just used the lash on him for leaving the...
On April 20, 1816, the Daily National Intelligencer, located in Washington D.C., published an article advertising fugitive slaves. The article began by stating, “Fifty persons of color were brought into this city, in the ship Lord Somers, from London.” The Intelligencer continued, “On examination, satisfactory evidence was produced, that forty-three were free, two the property of citizens...
In the year 1813 right outside Fredericksburg, Virginia, a slave was born. The name of the slave was Henry Watson. Henry was born into slavery by his late mother, Letty. Like most slaves he had no recollection of his age, he had heard that the age of a slave is kept by the different seasons of the year. If a child were to ask of their age, the answer would be similar to this quote “this planting...
Cyrus Branch's father, Neptune, was used to getting lied to. His first owner, a Colonel in the Revolutionary War originally promised him his freedom, but upon the war's end and having lost so much “property” already in the war, he deemed it impossible for him to lose Neptune's services as well. Upon his owner's death Neptune found himself in the hands of a new master who approached Neptune with...
Huddled beneath a large, decrepit tree in the woods, Isaac Mason was closer to freedom than ever before. He had escaped his master, which seemingly should have been the hardest part of his journey. However, Mason found himself desperately trying to convince his fellow fugitives that freedom was worth it—worth the wait and worth the nerves. Mason’s whole future, and his freedom, was on the...
More often than not, Ohio citizens showed no signs of guilt for the part they played in helping fugitive slaves. A Cincinnati newspaper editor bristled at the suggestion that his fellow Ohioans had deliberately committed crimes. "We have seen no evidence of it," he wrote in 1845. "We are not aware that any of them entered the slave States for the sake of helping off slaves. Being in those states, they...