Making Freedom: Resisting and Abolishing Slavery in New England and Beyond

1845-1850

1845  Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Poet, anti-slavery activist  

1845  First Douglass memoir is international bestseller

1845  Texas takeover decried as land grab for slavery

1846  After defeat, Mexico cedes 55% of its land to U.S. 

But the conquest of Mexican territory is more than an economic opportunity for Southern planters, according to Baumgarten. It is a political necessity. The remaining territories of the Louisiana Purchase (in which the U.S. acquires Louisiana from France for $15 million dollars – $357 million today – in 1803), as well as the recently organized Oregon territory, are expected to join the Union as free states. To maintain a balance between North and South in Congress, Southern enslavers and their political allies are counting on the U.S. gaining land from Mexico that can be turned into additional slave states.

Northern abolitionists attack the war as an attempt by enslavers to strengthen the grip of slavery and thus ensure their continued and dominating influence in the federal government. Three Protestant denominations—the Congregationalists, the Unitarians, and the Quakers—play a leadership role in mobilizing opposition to the war. Several hundred Irish, German, and other European immigrants defect from the U.S. Army and form the Saint Patrick's Battalion (San Patricios) to fight for Mexico alongside their fellow Catholics. Writer and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau, predicts: "The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as a man who swallowed the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." 

Events essentially prove him right: fierce arguments over the expansion of slavery in the lands seized from Mexico fuel the drift to civil war in the U.S. just a dozen years later. 

When the war gets underway, some U.S units invade Mexico and occupy the lands that become New Mexico and California after the war; others use their superior numbers and firepower to defeat the Mexican forces in a series of battles before marching to, and occupying, Mexico City. 

The U.S. forces include substantial numbers of free and enslaved African Americans – a fact largely overlooked by many historians. Excluded by federal law from enlisting in the army, most work as personal servants for White officers. They also serve as cooks and wagon drivers, care for the wounded, scour local markets for fresh produce, wash and dry clothes, and entertain the soldiers with song. Many Black servants risk their lives in battle by holding their “masters’” horses and bringing them food; and, with less clothing, food, shelter, and medical care than White soldiers, proportionately more die from disease than from battle wounds. 

Their loyal service brings African Americans “little relief from the prejudices, indignities, and violence” they have suffered back in the U.S., according to historian Robert E. May in an article entitled “Invisible Men: Blacks and the U.S. Army in the Mexican War.” Some enslaved workers take advantage of Mexico’s ban on slavery to flee and seek freedom across enemy lines, although the documentary record suggests relatively few succeed. The fact that so many African Americans choose to “endure severe hardship and risk their lives and health for low pay in Manifest Destiny’s war,” says May, “is a profound statement of their own career prospects.” He concludes that “service with the American army in Mexico seemed to offer a promising alternative to the marginal existence they forsook back home.”

The war takes a grim toll. Some 25,000 Mexicans, including 1,000 civilians, lose their lives and an estimated 13,000 U.S. soldiers die – the vast majority from sickness and diseases such as yellow fever. 

Peace negotiations result in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In exchange for a payment of $15 million, Mexico cedes to the U.S. 525,000 square miles – 55% of its national territory – encompassing nearly all the lands that now comprise New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Texas, and the western part of Colorado. 

During the negotiations, Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis de la Rosa, asks that the treaty formally exclude slavery from the ceded Mexican territories where it had already been abolished. But U.S. envoy Nicholas Trist, leader of the U.S. delegation, dismisses the suggestion out of hand. With Mexico City under U.S. occupation, and military governments ruling over northern Mexico, Trist feels no need or obligation to acknowledge and uphold Mexico’s laws against forced labor. 

The treaty makes no mention of slavery.

1846  "Father" of Underground Railroad helps free 800  

After passage of the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act, which requires escapees from slavery to be returned to their “owners,” Still organizes and chairs a Vigilance Committee of abolitionists in Philadelphia to support escapees and prevent them from being kidnapped by bounty hunters and re-enslaved. The Committee furnishes escapees with money, shelter, medicine, and railroad fares to Canada.   

Still has the trusted connections in Philadelphia’s Black community to find temporary board and lodging for the new arrivals. And the need is constant. According to Still’s records, during two hectic weeks in 1857, he and fellow members of the Vigilance Committee assist no less than 50 arriving fugitives. 

Still’s responsibilities include meeting new arrivals at the Philadelphia railroad station – among them three whose daring journeys to freedom become legendary: Ellen and William Craft, who travel from Georgia with light-skinned Ellen dressed as an ailing White male planter, and William posing as “his” faithful servant; and Henry “Box” Brown, enslaved in Virginia, who has himself mailed to Philadelphia in a wooden crate. 

One newcomer who had purchased his freedom contacts the PAAS, seeking information about his family. He meets with William Still, who listens to the man, Peter, tell his story. To William, the details are strikingly familiar –  it is the history that his mother had told him many times. To their consternation and joy, the two men realize that they are brothers. Their parents had been unable to free Peter and an older brother, Levin, Jr., when they were young and they had been sold to an Alabama planter. Levin, Jr. had died from whipping wounds, but Peter and his family had escaped. Peter and his mother had not seen each other in 42 years. Happily, they are soon reunited.

William Still works with other Underground Railroad agents operating in the South, including in Virginia ports, nearby Delaware and Maryland, and in many counties in southern Pennsylvania. His network to freedom also includes agents in New Jersey, New York, New England and Canada. Famed UGRR conductor Harriet Tubman passes through Still’s office with fellow passengers on several occasions during the 1850s. 

Still also forges a connection with the family of radical abolitionist John Brown. He shelters several of his associates who had been involved in Brown’s failed 1859 raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia aimed at sparking a widespread rebellion among the enslaved. 

During his work with the Vigilance Committee and the UGRR, Still interviews each new arrival in Philadelphia to ascertain their name, the name of their erstwhile “master,” where they had come from, and the details of their escape experiences. This is in part to identify imposters, according to historian Larry Gara, author of The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. But Still hopes the information he collects might help relatives and friends separated by slavery to find each other again – as had been the case with him and his brother, Peter. 

The data and stories that Still carefully gathers become the core of his book, The Underground Railroad Records, that he publishes in 1872 as “a monument to the heroism of the bondsmen under the yoke.” Gara writes that the book is “unique in that it emphasizes the courage and ingenuity of the fugitive. White conductors are the heroes in the accounts which the abolitionists recorded for posterity. In Still’s account, the daring fugitives are the heroes.” 

Historian Andrew Diemer, author of Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad, concurs. In an article for Smithsonian magazine, Diemer writes that when Still told the stories of the UGRR in his book “he removed himself from the spotlight and placed it on the actions of fugitives from slavery themselves.…This was by design. Still understood, and wanted his readers to understand, that fugitive slaves were the engine of the Underground Railroad, that they were agents in their own liberation.”

Still is a successful businessman – whose ventures includes a stove store and a coal delivery business – and he personally plans and supervises the promotion and sale of his book. The first two printings of 10,000 copies sell out, and a third edition follows.  The book is available in its original text online.

Still is a champion of civil rights and equal educational opportunities for African Americans, and is active in the Colored Conventions Movement that seeks to build Black leadership and advance Black abolitionist goals. In 1859, he initiates a successful campaign for equal service on Philadelphia’s public transit system, which leads to passage of a state law that desegregates streetcars. 

William Still dies at his Philadelphia home in 1902, and is buried in Eden Cemetery – the nation’s oldest African American-owned cemetery – in nearby Delaware County, Pennsylvania.   

1847  The North Star: Voice of Black abolitionism debuts 

Douglass has just returned to the U.S. after two years in Ireland and Britain, where he has given over 100 lectures in churches, chapels, and other venues to widespread acclaim. In addition, he has met with Thomas Clarkson, one of the last living British abolitionist leaders who spearheaded efforts to persuade the British Parliament to abolish slavery in Britain's colonies. 

British supporters give Douglass 500 pounds ($46,000 today) to help finance The North Star. They also raise funds to allow Douglass to buy his freedom from his American “owner,” Thomas Auld, and he becomes legally free during his trip.  

During what he described as his “liberating sojourn” in Britain, Douglass gives a number of lectures in Bristol, the city in the west of England that had been a major slaving port. Mary Estlin, a leading member of the Bristol and Clifton Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, describes one of his speeches, to over 1,000 people, as brimming with “powerful reasoning … touching appeals, keen sarcasm and graphic description.”

Mary Estlin later takes Douglass to the Blind Asylum, where visually impaired people are trained for employment in crafts such as basket- and mat-making. Her father, an eye surgeon, later writes: “Their delight was extreme to feel him and question him. I think F.D. will never forget the scene.”

1847  Sloop captain carries fugitives to freedom  

Born in the seafaring village of Barnstable on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Austin Bearse goes to sea at the age of eight, and works on merchant vessels that not only trade with the South, but also carry rice, cotton, and enslaved people from plantations to Southern ports for sale. 

The experience gives him first-hand exposure to the horrors of slavery – including the suicides of enslaved people who have been ripped apart from their families. He later writes: “My opinion is that American slavery, as I have seen it in the internal slave trade, as I have seen it on the rice and sugar plantations, and in the city of New Orleans, was fully as bad as any slavery in the world — heathen or Christian.”

Bearse becomes an ardent abolitionist, and an all-purpose agent of the interracial Boston Vigilance Committee, which aids and protects hundreds of escapees from slavery in the South. In particular, Bearse uses his skills as a seaman to rescue stowaways from ships arriving from the South. 

For example, in 1853, the Vigilance Committee learns that an escapee is aboard the brig, Florence, that has sailed from North Carolina and is anchored outside Boston Harbor. Posing as a government official, Bearse boards the ship with five other members of the Committee and successfully demands that the man, Sandy Swain, be turned over to them. 

The rescue team then disguises Swain in a fishing outfit and takes him to the nearby town of Brookline for the night. The Committee later organizes his journey via the Underground Railroad to Canada and freedom. 

The Boston Vigilance Committee’s “resident mariner” serves the Committee until its disbandment in 1861. In 1880, a year before his death, Austin Bearse publishes his memoir, Reminiscences of the Fugitive Slave-Law Days in Boston. 

1847  Liberia: Colony becomes independent nation

The vast majority of Black Americans reject the idea of moving to Liberia, or anywhere else for that matter. As abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass puts it: "Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here, and mean to live here.” By contrast, some Black activists support self-directed emigration as a choice for African Americans, with the revolutionary Black republic of Haiti being a favored destination. 

“The black mobilization against colonization became a key catalyst for the rise of a new,  militant abolitionism in the 1830s,” writes historian Eric Foner in his book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. “Compared to previous antislavery organizations that promoted gradual emancipation and, frequently, colonization, the new abolitionism was different: it was immediatist, interracial, and committed to making the United States a biracial nation of equals.”

Liberia has an inauspicious start: of the 4,571 emigrants who arrive in the new colony between 1820 and 1843, only 40% (1,819) survive. The colonists are attacked by Indigenous peoples, including the Malinké tribes, on whose land the colony has been established. And disease, the harsh climate, lack of food and medicine, and poor housing conditions all take their toll. 

1847  Preacher defies law, creates steamboat school 

Meanwhile, Meachum and his wife, Mary, are working in other ways for Black freedom and education. Their home is a stop on the Underground Railroad, and they assist in transporting numerous escapees from slavery across the Mississippi River to the free state of Illinois. (Two members of the Meachum household are boatmen.) 

The Meachums also help enslaved people buy their freedom as they had done. A successful entrepreneur as well as a preacher, Meachum owns two riverboats and operates a barrel-making factory. Over a 10-year period, the Meachums purchase more than 20 enslaved people, teach them to read and write, and provide them with on-the-job training and paid employment. Once these workers have saved enough to repay their debt, the Meachums emancipate them. Nearly every person freed by the Meachums pays them back, and the money is used to free others.  

In 1846, John Meachum publishes a pamphlet, An Address to All of the Colored Citizens of the United States, in which he emphasizes the importance of collective unity and self-respect. He stresses that Black people need to receive practical, hands-on education in order to support themselves after emancipation. 

After his death in 1854, Mary Meachum continues to work with the Underground Railroad. The following year, she and a free Black man named Isaac transport nine freedom-seekers by boat across the Mississippi River to the free state of Illinois. But when they reach shore, Mary Meachum and Isaac are arrested, jailed, and charged with “slave theft” under the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act. Mary is acquitted by a jury of one charge; the other charges against the two of them are dropped. 

In 2001, The Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing in St. Louis, named in her honor, is the first site in Missouri to be accepted in the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

1847  The Crafts: Tireless speakers against slavery after daring escape 

Given their traumatic experiences of family loss, the Crafts despair over having children of their own, fearing they would be torn away from them. “The mere thought,” William later wrote of his wife’s distress, “filled her soul with horror.” Determined to get away, they hatch their daring escape plan. 

Before setting out, William cuts Ellen’s hair to neck length. She improves on the deception by putting her right arm in a sling, which will prevent hotel clerks and others from expecting “him” to sign a registry or other papers. (Georgia law prohibits teaching slaves to read or write, and Ellen and William can do neither.) Refining the invalid disguise, William wraps bandages around much of Ellen’s face, hiding her smooth skin and giving her a reason to limit conversation with strangers. She wears a pair of men’s trousers that she herself has sewed, and dons a pair of green spectacles and a top hat. They kneel and pray before taking “a desperate leap for liberty.”

On December 21, the Crafts begin their perilous four-day journey to freedom. After leaving Macon early in the morning, they catch a train to Savannah, Georgia. From there, they travel up the East Coast, taking various steamers and trains. They experience several heart-stopping moments that could have led to their discovery and capture. But courage, quick thinking, luck, and “our Heavenly Father,” sustain them, the Crafts recount in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery, the book they wrote in 1860 chronicling their escape.

They reach Philadelphia – and freedom – on Christmas morning. Quickly assisted and housed by the local underground abolitionist network, they receive a reading lesson on their very first day in the city. Three weeks later, they head north to Boston where they are welcomed into the vibrant free Black community on Beacon Hill, which is both a haven for escapees from slavery and a hub of abolitionist activism.

The Crafts are soon on the abolitionist lecture circuit, often in the care and company of Williams Well Brown, who had also escaped slavery and is telling his personal story from the stage at packed anti-slavery meetings across Massachusetts and beyond. 

The Crafts become a sensation. As historian Ilyon Woo describes in her book about the Crafts, Master Slave Husband Wife, “...everyone wanted not only to be near these celebrities but also to touch them. For a couple who had escaped slavery only two months earlier – who had already traveled one thousand miles, and were now required to replay the story of their lives night after night – it was surely exhausting as well as unsettling. Still, they moved without a pause.” They logged more than 60 lectures over the course of a few months on the road. 

The Crafts make a modest living in Boston, establishing their own small businesses as cabinet maker and seamstress respectively. But passage of the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Law – that requires that escapees from slavery be returned to their “owners” – increases the threats to their safety. Black and White abolitionists with the Boston Vigilance Committee thwart slave hunters, who come to Boston to claim the Crafts for their enslavers, by moving them to different “safe houses” across the city.  

Aided by their supporters, the Crafts decide to move to England where they are hosted by prominent abolitionists, and tour the country speaking against slavery and recounting their experiences. During their 19 years there – first living in Liverpool, then in London –  the Crafts raise five children, Ellen participates in anti-slavery and women’s suffrage organizations, and their home becomes a hub of Black activism. Together, they write Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, one of the most compelling of the many autobiographical slave narratives published before the Civil War.  

With the outbreak of the war, the Crafts decide to continue the fight for justice from their base in England, each in different ways. William travels to the west coast of Africa – where his ancestors had been kidnapped into slavery – and works, with some success, to persuade the King of Dahomey (now Benin) to end the slave trade there and promote economic alternatives. William becomes a teacher, activist, and businessman, and opens a school on the grounds of a former barracks where enslaved people were held before being transported across the Atlantic on slave ships. 

Ellen, meanwhile, raises their children and continues her activism in England. She mobilizes support and funding for the Union, for a girls’ school in Sierra Leone, and for the aid and education of recently emancipated people. She also makes clothes for some of them.

In 1868, after the war ends and the abolition of slavery and citizenship rights are guaranteed by constitutional amendments, the Crafts return to the U.S. with three of their children. With funds raised from supporters, they start a cooperative farm school in Georgia that provides educational and employment opportunities for freedmen. In 1890, the Crafts move to Charleston, South Carolina to live with their daughter Ellen, and her husband. The elder Ellen Craft dies in 1891, and William nine years later. 

The Crafts are honored in both the U.S. and the U.K. Ellen Craft is in the Georgia Women’s Hall of Fame, and the Crafts and their accomplishments are featured at the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia. Their residence in Hammersmith, London is commemorated with an historic plaque at Craft Court, an apartment building close to where they had lived. 

1848  Failed escape shows capital's role in slave trade 

Most of the “owners” of the escapees respond by selling them. About 50 are sold to slave traders from Georgia and Louisiana, who transport them to slave markets in the Lower South, most likely in New Orleans, Louisiana, Natchez, Mississippi, and Huntsville, Alabama. There they are likely bought by enslavers to work on their large sugar and cotton plantations – where two-thirds of enslaved people in the South labor at the beginning of the Civil War. Friends and families of some of the freedom-seekers scramble to locate their loved ones and buy them from the traders before they are taken south. One case in particular attracts national attention.   

In her book, The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac, historian Josephine F. Pacheco describes the efforts of Paul and Amelia Edmonson to secure the freedom of their six children: Richard, Samuel, Ephraim, John, Mary, and Emily. Following the childrens’ capture on the Pearl, their enslavers sell them to an Alexandria, Virginia, slave-trading firm which, in turn, transports them to New Orleans. Meanwhile, the Edmonsons contact anti-slavery sympathizers and manage to enlist the assistance of the prominent Beecher family. 

Abolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher uses his pulpit to deliver the message of the Edmonson family and to raise the necessary funds to purchase the freedom of the six Edmonson children. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, publishes the story of the Edmonsons, which informs her highly influential work Uncle Tom's Cabin. Later, the Beechers also raise money to send Mary and Emily Edmonson to Oberlin College.

The Pearl venture has a notable political impact. The event itself and the subsequent riots receive widespread media coverage, especially in abolitionist newspapers, and provoke vociferous debates in Congress. They also cast a spotlight on Washington, D.C.’s role as a major slave market and a center of the domestic slave trade: with its connection to the Chesapeake Bay by the Potomac River, Washington is an important transit point for captives being transported or marched overland from the Upper South to markets or owners in the Deep South. Numerous White families in the city are active enslavers.   

Washington, D.C. is also home to a strong interracial abolitionist community that is working to end slavery and the slave trade. To that end, abolitionists had sought to plan an event that would command the attention of Congress and the country. The Pearl enterprise clearly succeeds in that regard. Historians differ on the extent of its influence on the decision to end the slave trade in the District of Columbia – a provision included in the Compromise of 1850, a Congressional legislative package that temporarily defuses tensions between slave and free states.   

1848  Susie King Taylor: Trailblazing nurse and educator    

Later in 1862, military leaders begin recruiting refugees on the island to form the ranks of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first Black regiment in the U.S. Army (later known as the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops.) Taylor joins up, and is officially designated the regimental laundress. But she does a lot more than cooking and washing. She packs haversacks and cartridge packs for the soldiers to use in combat, and does her share of picket line duty. And she and her new husband, Sergeant Edward King, use their spare time to expand the education of many Black soldiers by teaching them how to read and write. The unit’s White abolitionist colonel, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, later wrote of his men, “Their love of the spelling-book is perfectly inexhaustible.” 

Together, the Kings remain with the First South Carolina Volunteers until 1866 when they are mustered out of service. During her four years and three months with the unit, Susie Taylor King had given freely of her labor and had not been paid. As she notes in her later unsuccessful request for a military pension, she had effectively served as an army nurse, constantly caring for the wounded and sick, in addition to her other duties. (During her time as a nurse, she meets Massachusetts-born Clara Barton, a fellow nurse who later founds the American Red Cross.) 

After the war, the Kings move to Savannah, Georgia. Susie returns to her teaching career, and opens at least two private schools for African-American children. Her husband, a skilled carpenter, struggles to find carpentry work because of White hostility towards newly freed African Americans, and he is tragically killed in a docking accident while laboring as a longshoreman. His death comes just months before the birth of their first child. The establishment of charter schools for African American children forces Taylor to close her private schools, and she is no longer able to make a living through teaching. She turns to domestic work as an alternative.

During the post-war Reconstruction era, Taylor becomes a civil rights activist. In her memoirs, entitled Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops and published in 1902, Taylor mentions the constant lynching of Black people and how Southern laws were weaponized against anyone who was not White. 

In 1872, Taylor moves to Boston, Massachusetts where seven years later she marries her second husband, Russell Taylor. She devotes much of the rest of her life to working with the Woman’s Relief Corps, a national organization for female Civil War veterans. 

Susie King Taylor dies in 1912, and is buried at Boston's Mount Hope Cemetery. In 2021, Boston mayor Kim Janey dedicates a new memorial headstone inscribed with Ms. Taylor's name and likeness. It is paid for by the Massachusetts branch of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. 

1848  New party pledges not to expand slavery  

1849  Harriet Tubman: "Moses" is also top Union spy

Tubman meets revolutionary abolitionist John Brown in 1858, and helps him plan and recruit supporters for his failed raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia aimed at sparking a widespread uprising among the enslaved.  

When the Civil War begins, Tubman works for the Union Army, initially as a cook and nurse. She then volunteers to help the Army gather intelligence behind Confederate lines, and becomes an armed scout and spy. 

Her years of guiding people away from slavery, arranging clandestine meetings, scouting routes without drawing attention to herself, thinking on her feet, and holding a vast and complex amount of information in her head, have equipped Tubman with an ideal set of skills for her new role. She creates a spy and scouting network of formerly enslaved people, local water pilots, and others. Dressed as a field hand, she leads missions to identify and map the locations of Confederate mines, supply areas, and troops. 

In June of 1863, Tubman makes history as the first woman to plan and lead an armed expedition in the war. The raid on Combahee Ferry, South Carolina is designed to destroy bridges, raid Confederate outposts and rice plantations, and cut off supply lines to Confederate troops.

In preparation for the raid, Tubman had earlier slipped behind enemy lines and gathered intelligence from enslaved people about where Confederates had planted torpedoes (mines) along the Combahee River. As a result, the Union gunboats deftly avoid the mines, and the raid, involving 150 soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment – which is made up primarily of African American volunteers and includes Native Americans – is an inspiring success. The troops liberate more than 750 enslaved people who are unaware that President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had officially freed them months earlier. More than 100 of the liberated men sign up to fight with the Union forces.

After the war, Harriet Tubman retires to the family home – built on land in Auburn, New York that she purchased from a White abolitionist ally – where she cares for her aging parents. She is active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtakes her, and she is admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she herself helped to establish years earlier. She dies of pneumonia in 1913, surrounded by friends and family, and is buried with semi-military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. 

In the years following her death, Harriet Tubman becomes an American icon. A survey at the end of the 20th century names her as one of the most famous civilians in U.S. history before the Civil War. 

In 2013, President Barack Obama uses his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Other state parks in New York state and Maryland are named in her honor.  

1849  Mexico: Freedom for escapees at a price  

However, says Baumgartner, “each escape was important in its own right. And their collective story had strategic and political significance out of all proportion to the numbers involved. Their experiences reorient our understanding of the Civil War, showing that one of the most distinctively ‘American’ events in U.S. history was in part ignited by the enslaved people who escaped to the south and the laws by which they claimed their freedom in Mexico.”

In many ways, those who seek freedom in Mexico face more daunting challenges than the enslaved who head north to the free states and Canada. In an article entitled "The Little Known History of Texas’ Underground Railroad" for Texas Highways magazine, journalist Maya Payne Smart notes that getting to pre-Civil War Mexico requires escapees from bondage to navigate slave states; there is no coordinated support to provide refuge and protection along the way; and Texas is not home to abolitionist societies eager to help those on the run. Moreover, because the number of free Black people in Texas before the war never rises above a few hundred, hiding in plain sight is not possible. As a result, assistance networks for Black fugitives in Texas tend to be loose and unstable.

In analyzing how enslaved people in the U.S. seek refuge, historian Thomas Mareite finds that most of the help offered to runaways heading for Mexico – directions, guidance, supplies, shelter – comes from fellow Black people, sympathetic Mexican laborers, and to a lesser extent, German settlers who oppose slavery. Although technically “free” in the U.S., Mexican migrant workers often labor alongside enslaved people and develop personal relationships with them. Their empathy, experience crossing the border, and Spanish fluency make them able guides and intermediaries for runaways seeking to abscond south, according to Mareite. 

Enslavers are sometimes dismayed by the help Mexican laborers offer Black escapees, to the point that some Texas towns expel Mexican workers from their jurisdictions altogether. Others opt to make examples of those who assist escapees by publicly whipping or hanging them.

Even for those escapees who make it to Mexico, freedom is by no means absolute and it comes at a price. They have basically two options to survive and make a living: join the Mexican military outposts to defend the northeastern frontier against foreign invaders and raiding parties of Comanches and Lipan Apaches; or work as indentured servants, sometimes in slavery-like conditions.

1850  Harsher Fugitive Slave Act is part of political deal

The 1850 law contains harsher penalties for violators and demands that local people and institutions play an active role in its enforcement. 

Law enforcement officials everywhere are required to arrest anyone who is allegedly escaping from slavery or pay a fine of $1,000 ($30,732 in present-day value). Anyone assisting such a person by providing food or shelter is also heavily penalized: up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine. A suspected fugitive from slavery can be arrested on as slim a pretext as a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership; the accused person has no right to a jury trial and cannot testify. 

There are financial incentives to capture and return alleged runaways. Judges receive $10 for each person so proven ($5 if not); arresting officers are entitled to a bonus or promotion. 

The new law increases the dangers of kidnapping and enslavement by slave-catchers for already free African Americans, as well as for fugitives from slavery, because they have no rights in court and cannot legally defend themselves. It also brings the issue home to anti-slavery citizens in the North in a direct and personal way: it makes them and their institutions responsible for enforcing slavery. 

The Fugitive Slave Act galvanizes Northern sentiments against slavery. Activists mobilize and campaign to prevent individuals arrested and accused of being fugitives from slavery from being sent south to bondage. Even moderate abolitionists face the immediate choice of defying what they believe to be an unjust law, or breaking with their own consciences and beliefs.

1850-1860  Underground Railroad helps thousands secure freedom 

Within days of the law’s enactment, hundreds of Black Americans – freeborn and self-emancipated – leave their homes in the northern states and head for the greater security of Canada where slavery is illegal. In Boston, Massachusetts, 60 of the 180 parishioners at the Twelfth Baptist Church – known as the Fugitive Slave Church for its aid to escapees from slavery, many of whom joined the congregation – disappear almost overnight.

The unprecedented mass exodus continues. More than 20,000 cross the Canadian border over the next few years to claim and safeguard their freedom. The UGRR plays a key role in ensuring their safe passage and arrival.    

For example, over nine months in 1854 and 1855, the all-Black and mostly female Committee of Nine, which oversees the work of the UGRR in Cleveland, Ohio, helps 275 escapees reach the free soil of Canada – an average of one per day.

In Syracuse, New York about 140 fugitives from bondage pass through the city with the help of the UGRR during a 10-month period in 1855 and 1856, according to a local newspaper. And in Detroit, the Detroit Vigilance Committee – possibly the busiest of such support groups for escapees – reports that 1,043 fugitives cross to Canada from May 1855 to January 1856, an average of 130 per month. 

Estimates of the total number of fugitives assisted by the UGRR, from its beginnings in the late 18th century to the start of the Civil War in 1861, range from 70,000 to 130,000, according to historian Fergus M. Bordewich, author of Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement. This represents between 0.75 % and 3.3% of the 3.95 million people who are enslaved in the U.S. at the beginning of the war.

Most freedom seekers settle in the northern U.S. states, wherever they feel safe and can obtain work. Perhaps one-third or one-quarter find sanctuary in Canada, where slavery had been banned – as in other British colonies – in 1834. A relatively small number of escapees from slavery head south to Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1829. They have no organized abolitionist support, and their perilous journeys take them through slave states. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 beat the odds and claim their freedom in Mexico.  

The UGRR is an aid and support network, and a metaphorical transit system (the first actual underground railroad is not built until 1863 in London, U.K.) It consists of meeting points, secret routes, transportation, and safe houses, all of them maintained by abolitionist sympathizers and communicated by word of mouth. Participants generally organize in small, independent groups to help maintain secrecy. 

People escaping enslavement move along the route from one way station to the next, guided by "conductors" who include freeborn and formerly enslaved African Americans, White abolitionists, and Native Americans. Christian congregations and clergy play an important role, especially the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Congregationalists, Wesleyan Methodists, and Reformed Presbyterians. 

At the end of the line is “heaven,” or “the Promised Land” – the free soil of the northern U.S. states or Canada. The famed “drinking gourd” is the Big Dipper constellation, which points to the North Star – a guide for those making their way north.

The best known Underground Railroad activist is the legendary Harriet Tubman, who leads more than 70 men and women to freedom from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Other prominent UGRR leaders include: 

• William Still, dubbed the “Father of the Underground Railroad,” who helps as many as 800 fugitives from slavery find new lives in freedom through his work with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and a Vigilance Committee he organizes in Philadelphia that aids and protects escapees. 

• Harriet and Lewis Hayden, whose home is a safe haven for an estimated 75 percent of the hundreds of fugitives from slavery who pass through Boston, Massachusetts on their way to greater freedom and security in Canada. 

• Thomas Smallwood, a formerly enslaved shoemaker, working with Massachusetts-born Congregationalist minister Charles Turner Torrey in the Washington, D.C. area, transports an estimated 400 enslaved people to freedom, mostly on horse-drawn wagons. 

• The journalist David Ruggles, the driving force in the creation of New York City’s Vigilance Committee and UGRR network that helps more than 500 African Americans to gain or retain their freedom; they include those who have escaped from slavery and free Black people kidnapped off city streets by slave traders to be sold as slaves in the South.

• George de Baptiste, a barber and businessman, who coordinates a mainly African-American underground network in southern Indiana, and later helps establish one of the UGRR’s most successful operations in Detroit, Michigan.

• Physician Bartholomew Fussell, who aids an estimated 2,000 escapees from slavery, sheltering many of them in his Pennsylvania home. Fussell also influences the founding of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, the world’s second such training institution for women. 

• Levi Coffin, a North Carolina-born Quaker, who forms networks in eastern Indiana and southern Ohio, and assists thousands of fugitives in his 40-year underground career. 

• The fiery minister John Rankin, who anchors a network of Presbyterian UGRR activists in southern Ohio.  

• Gerrit Smith, one of the wealthiest men in the U.S., who provides financing for much underground abolitionist activity around the country, and shelters fugitives at his Peterboro, New York home. 

Bordewich writes that the importance of the Underground Railroad cannot be judged just by numbers, or even by the inspiring quality of its saga of dramatic escapes, recaptures, and feats of individual courage. 

The UGRR was “the nation’s first great movement of civil disobedience since the American Revolution” that “engaged thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law and the prevailing mores of their communities, and for the first time asserted the principle of personal, active responsibility for others’ human rights.”

In Bordewich’s view, by provoking fear and anger in the South, and by prompting the enactment of harsh legislation that eroded the rights of White Americans, the Underground Railroad “was a direct contributing cause of the Civil War.”

It also had another enduring impact. “The underground and the broader abolition movement of which it was a part also fostered American feminism: women were for the first time participants in a political movement on an equal plane with men, publicly insisting that their voices be heard, sheltering and clothing fugitive slaves, serving as guides, and risking reprisals against their families.” 

1850  Abolitionist Nancy Gardner Prince publishes autobiography

After moving to Boston, she meets and marries Nero Prince, a former sailor and co-founder of the Prince Hall Freemasons, which is part of a growing network of free Black activist and mutual aid groups. By the time they wed, Nero Prince has already spent more than 10 years as a footman in the court of the Russian Czar – Russian and European royals commonly employ “Moors” as servants at this time – and the couple soon relocate to the city of St. Petersburg. Nancy Gardner Prince learns French and Russian, helps establish an orphanage, and runs her own business making clothes for infants and toddlers. Her customers include the Czarina. Ten years later, she returns to Boston in advance of her husband, who dies in Russia.

A devoutly religious woman, Gardner Prince makes an unsuccessful attempt to start a home for orphans in Boston. Active in the New England Anti-Slavery Society, she is impressed by the possibilities for Black self-determination in the West Indies following the end of slavery there, and she undertakes two missions to Jamaica. Supported in part by Nantucket-born abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucretia Coffin Mott, Prince plans to establish a Free Labor School for destitute girls, among other projects. But her efforts largely fail – as does her health – and she heads home in 1843. 

On the return voyage, the ship on which she is traveling is blown off-course by a hurricane, and Prince finds herself aboard a leaking hulk being towed into the port of New Orleans. As a Black woman, she cannot safely go ashore, and spends days watching enslaved men, women, and children in chains being loaded onto other vessels for transportation to Texas plantations. Asked from the shore to whom she belongs, she asserts her status as “a free-born child of God” and invokes the name of her father, Thomas Gardner. Miraculously, his name is known in New Orleans, and her status as free, supported by her Russian travel documents, gets her off the wrecked ship and on her way to New York. 

Back in Boston, Prince starts her own seamstress business and gives lectures about her travels to Russia and Jamaica. At the same time, she continues to work for emancipation as a member of the interracial Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. At one point, she leads a group of Black women who stop a slave catcher from kidnapping an escapee from slavery and returning the person to bondage under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. She also speaks out for women's rights; at the Fifth National Women’s Rights Convention in Philadelphia in 1854, she protests the mistreatment of enslaved women. 

Struggling financially and beset by ill-health, Nancy Gardner Prince sees the second and third editions of her book published. But there is no information about her from 1856 until her death three years later. The place of her burial was unknown until 2021, when researcher Ali Tal-mason located Gardner Prince’s unmarked gravesite in Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett, Massachusetts. Beacon Hill Scholars collaborated in the creation of the memorial marker installed there.

1850  Race scientist strives to prove Black inferiority 

In 2019, Tamara Lanier, a direct descendant of Renty and Delia, sues the university for the return of the images and unspecified damages. The lawsuit is supported by 43 living descendants of Louis Agassiz, who write a letter of support that reads in part: "For Harvard to give the daguerreotypes to Ms. Lanier and her family would begin to make amends for its use of the photos as exhibits for the white supremacist theory Agassiz espoused,” and that everyone must evaluate fully "his role in promoting a pseudoscientific justification for white supremacy." 

In 2022, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules that Lanier cannot own the images but can sue Harvard University for emotional distress.

The case adds to the renewed focus on the role of the country’s oldest universities in relation to slavery and its legacy, amid a growing debate over reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. 

Agassiz is a disciple of the race scientist Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia physician. Starting in the 1830s, Morton uses measurements from his world-famous collection of skulls to purportedly show that Black people have the smallest “cranial capacity” of all human types and consequently are doomed to inferiority. In 1854, Agassiz and another Morton adherent, Josiah Nott, together publish Types of Mankind, a 700-page treatise dedicated to Morton that allegedly proves that Black people are not even of the same species as Whites.

In his book, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity, historian Donald Yacovone writes that Agassiz’s “immense” influence on American science and education “cannot be overestimated.” Agassiz “weaponized science to guarantee the subservience of African Americans and enshrine whiteness as the highest scientific category of human development. Next to law and religion, science exerted the most widespread and permanent impact on the institutionalization of white supremacy, and Louis Agassiz was its most potent champion.”

In 2025, Tamara Lanier finally wins her 15-year legal battle. Harvard University agrees to hand over the images and to an undisclosed financial settlement. The images will be housed in the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina – the land where Renty and Delia Taylor were enslaved. The museum is located at a former shipping wharf where about 40% of enslaved Africans brought to the U.S. disembarked. 

Tonya Matthews, director of the museum, calls it a moment “175 years in the making.” 

In a statement, Matthews says: “The bravery, tenacity, and grace shown by Ms. Lanier throughout the long and arduous process of returning these critical pieces of Renty and Delia’s story to South Carolina is a model for us all.”

The museum has committed to working with Lanier and including her in decisions about how the story of the images will be told.

1850  Martin Delany: Abolitionist leader champions Black self-reliance  

After moving to Pittsburgh in 1831, Delany works on the waterfront, loading coal and pig iron onto barges while continuing his education. He takes adult classes at an African Methodist Episcopal Church, and also learns Latin, Greek, and history from a Black college student who shares his room in exchange for tutoring. 

Pursuing his dream to be a doctor, Delany persuades a local physician to take him on as an assistant. He later continues his medical studies with mentoring from several abolitionist doctors and starts his own practice. During a severe cholera outbreak in Pittsburgh in 1854, most doctors abandon the city but Delany and a small group of nurses remain and care for the sick.

Increasingly active on political issues, Delany attends his first National Negro Convention and begins publishing The Mystery, an anti-slavery newspaper for Black Pennsylvanians. It carries occasional articles from other such newspapers, including The Liberator, published in Boston by the White abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp. 

In 1847, Garrison and Frederick Douglass visit Pittsburgh on an abolitionist speaking tour and the three men meet for the first time. Douglass has been mulling the idea of launching his own Black-run newspaper and Delany – with four years’ experience editing and producing The Mystery – agrees to partner with Douglass on the new venture. They are joined by the Boston-based Black abolitionist, William Cooper Nell, and the North Star is launched in Rochester, New York. 

The experience of being admitted – and then summarily thrown out – of Harvard Medical School because of his skin color fuels Delany’s growing commitment to Black self-determination and self-reliance. 

In his 1852 book, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, Delany argues that Black people have no future in the U.S. He argues that they should leave and found a new nation elsewhere, perhaps in the West Indies or South America. It should be entirely independent and Black-controlled – unlike the plan promoted by the federally-funded American Colonization Society for a colony in West Africa for Black American emigrants. The controversial ACS plan, overwhelmingly opposed by African Americans, is primarily backed by enslavers eager to rid the country of free Black people and the perceived threat they pose to the continued existence of slavery. (Ironically, Delany’s two fellow Black students at Harvard had been ACS supporters.) 

Delany – who is credited with the Pan-African slogan, "Africa for Africans” – advances his emigrationist argument in his second manifesto, Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent. In 1854, he is one of the leaders of the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio that passes a resolution, now widely considered the foundation of Black nationalism as it is understood today: “[A]s men and equals, we demand every political right, privilege, and position to which the whites are eligible in the United States, and we will either attain to these, or accept nothing.” 

In 1856, concerned about the negative impacts of racial discrimination on their children, Delany and his wife, Catherine, move their family to Chatham in what is now southwest Ontario, Canada. A third of the town’s 4,000 population are free Black Americans and escapees from slavery, and the Delanys are soon active in the Underground Railroad. They help resettle newly arrived fugitives and prevent them from being returned to bondage as mandated by the federal Fugitive Slave Acts in the U.S. 

In 1858, Martin Delany helps radical abolitionist John Brown organize a series of clandestine meetings in Chatham to plan the creation of a revolutionary independent republic in the Appalachian Mountains as the base for a guerrilla war against slavery in the South. The following year, Brown leads a raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia aimed at seizing a large quantity of guns and sparking a widespread uprising of enslaved people. The raid fails and Brown and four others are executed for treason. 

Delany learns the news while traveling in West Africa. The American Colonization Society had established the colony of Liberia in the region. But Delany is investigating the possibility of an alternative settlement: one that would be Black-financed and Black-led, with profits accruing to Black people. Bringing their skills and experience, African-Americans emigrants could contribute to the “regeneration” of Africa. 

Delany travels for nine months in the Niger delta and signs an agreement with eight Indigenous chiefs in the Abeokuta region that would permit African-American settlers to live on “unused land” in return for helping to improve the community. Delany begins planning the settlement, recruits a group of potential settlers, and raises funds. But the plan fails to bear fruit because of local conflicts, opposition by White missionaries, and the advent of the Civil War.

After returning to the U.S., Delany helps recruit thousands of Black soldiers for the Union Army in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Ohio. His son, Toussaint Louverture Delany, named after the Haitian revolutionary leader, serves with the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment. In 1865, Delany is commissioned as a major – the highest rank possible for an African American during the Civil War – and thus becomes the first Black field officer in the U.S. Army. 

After the war, he is transferred to the Freedmen’s Bureau,  which is tasked with providing food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to displaced Southerners. In South Carolina, he strongly supports the redistribution of land to newly emancipated families – a position that shocks some White officers. He later resigns from the Army. 

Delany continues to be politically active. He establishes a land and brokerage business, working to help Black cotton farmers get a better price for their product, and travels and speaks in support of the Colored Conventions Movement to push for Black rights. In response to Black voter suppression after Reconstruction, Delany is involved in an ultimately frustrated venture by Black residents of Charleston, South Carolina to organize an emigration to Africa. He withdraws from the project for family reasons. 

In his book, In the Service of God and Humanity: Conscience, Reason, and the Mind of Martin R. Delany, historian Tunde Adeleke comments that, in his writings, Delany “spoke in a language that leading Black activists today utilize in their reactions to the contemporary state of Black America.” He quotes Delany as follows: “There appears to be a fixed determination on the part of the oppressors in this country to destroy every vestige of self-respect, self-possession, and manly independence left in the colored people.” 

Martin Robison Delany dies of tuberculosis on January 24, 1885. In 2006, the National Museum of African American History and Culture honors him and his family with the installation of a monument of Black granite at the family grave site in Cedarville, Ohio.