John Thompson’s Railroad
1857
For the first time in his life, nineteen-year-old John Thompson felt free. As the train pulled out of the Alabama train depot, the night wind blew refreshingly cool on his skin. While the train chugged north, the passengers looking out the windows were treated to a blue moon landscape under a star-studded sky. Thompson, however, had the best view—he was riding on top of the train.
For John, it was high time to escape. He was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1838 and had grown up forty miles east, in Alexandria. For as long as he could remember, he had answered to a master. The last time John Thompson had seen any of his siblings was when he was five years old. They had been sold to various owners, making it impossible for him to keep connected to his family.
His earliest memory was of being sold away from his mother, Matilda Tate, and taken from his home in Virginia to North Carolina. In the years afterward, it seemed as if John was sold whenever a master thought there was money to be made off of him. He finally ended up in Huntsville, Alabama, on a cotton plantation belonging to Hezekiah Thompson. While John took on his master’s surname, that was all he had in common with the man.
Hezekiah Thompson was a cruel master. The profitability of his plantation crop depended on having his slaves work harder than was humanly possible. Master Thompson was a young man “fond of drinking and carousing, and always ready for a fight or a knock-down.” John decided to make a break for freedom after being beaten so severely with a bullwhip that his arm was rendered useless for half a week.
For two years he had toiled endlessly in Alabama cotton fields for Hezekiah Thompson, watching trains pass by. At last he came up with a plan to ride north to freedom on one of those passing trains one way or another.
John escaped under the cover of night, making his way to the train depot. When all the ticketed passengers were on board, the conductor signaled the engineer, and the train slowly lurched out of the station. John hid in some brush by the tracks. When the train began to accelerate, he ran alongside, pulling himself up and scrambling unnoticed to the roof of one of the cars. He lay flat, hanging onto the roof as his heart beat furiously. The sensation of freedom was thrilling.
John had no other plan than to scramble on and off trains, riding at night, and hiding and sleeping during the day. Somehow he had to find out which trains would take him from Alabama back to his childhood home in Alexandria, Virginia, where he hoped he could see his mother again. John had no knowledge of geography. He would have to rely on overhearing people’s conversations in the train station. He thought perhaps he could masquerade as someone’s valet, getting luggage, but soon noticed he did not have the appropriate attire. He had to resort to hiding in the underbrush near the track and listening as the conductors yelled out the train destinations.
For more than six hundred miles and over the course of two weeks, the determined young man fought fear, hunger, and exhaustion as he traveled home toward Alexandria. Each peaceful night ride through the countryside abruptly ended with the screech of brakes and a billow of steam from the engine, which thankfully helped to conceal him at times as he scurried from the train. Under the cover of darkness, John would jump off and disappear into the brush to wait out the day and forage for food. He also had to be wary of slave patrollers looking for runaways.
Finally John reached Richmond, Virginia, a slave-trading center. He knew Richmond was not safe due to the many slave chasers in the area. He intended to leave the city, making his way to Alexandria as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, after two short weeks of freedom, he was found out and apprehended. Without free papers, John was put in prison and his master, Hezekiah Thompson, was sent for. Word reached John’s mother, Matilda, that he was back in the state. She visited him in jail, overjoyed to see her son, yet saddened at the occasion. While it broke his heart to see his mother distressed, John reassured her that better days lay ahead.
Hezekiah Thompson came up north to claim John, at first intending to take him back to Alabama to “make an example of him.” He soon changed his mind, however, and put John up on the auction block.
A Richmond slave trader named Green McMurray bought John for $1,300. McMurray saw great promise in him, and planned to put him up for resale immediately. But there were no takers due to the inflated asking price and hard times.
John Thompson was still determined to have his freedom. The train he went looking for the next time, however, was on the Underground Railroad. Many escape routes had their junctions in Virginia, and a well-organized system of “lines” led out of the city. He escaped from Green McMurray and made his way back to Alexandria, where he saw his mother once again. He had six brothers and sisters, some of whom he had not seen since he was five years old.
In October of 1857 John Thompson, together with a man from Charleston, South Carolina, named William Cooper, found their way to Philadelphia, to the Pennsylvania Anti-slavery Society, whose secretary, William Still, was said to assist any fugitive slave who found their office.
William Still listened attentively to Thompson’s story, marveling at his creative mode of escape. The Vigilance Committee then assisted both John Thompson and William Cooper by forwarding them farther north.
Settled in Syracuse, New York, John wrote to his mother, “I hird when I was on the Underground R. Road that the Hounds was on my track but it was no go. I new I was too far out of their Reach where they would never smell my track.” He had learned the trade of barbering and set up shop with a friend. “I am getting $12 per month for what Little work I am Doing.” Compared to picking cotton, being a barber surely must not have seemed like hard labor.
John Thompson was content and did quite well for two years. However, his former master, Green McMurray, had not forgiven him for running away. Someone betrayed John, and he learned just in time that McMurray was in town, searching for him. Fearing recapture, Thompson immediately took leave of the city and set sail for London, far from the grasp of slaveholders. He arrived across the Atlantic in December of 1860.
There is no record that John Thompson was ever reunited with his mother, or even if he returned to the United States after slavery was abolished in 1865. Perhaps his mother was comforted by a letter he had once written her in which he claimed:
I am now a free man Living By the sweet of my own Brow not serving a nother man & giving him all I Earn But what I make is mine and iff one Plase do not sute me I am at Liberty to Leave and go some where elce & can ashore you I think highly of Freedom and would not exchange it for nothing that is offered me for it.