Acknowledgement
Acknowlegements, Notes on Sources, and the Case of The Two Isaac Browns
My interest in Isaac Brown was first kindled in January 1977. As did millions of others, I sat in front of a television set for eight consecutive nights, mesmerized by the dramatization of Alex Haley’s book Roots. Although fascinated with history from an early age, and despite growing up in Buxton, which was once a haven for fugitive slaves and was then (as now) a place that had a museum that celebrated the stories of those remarkable people, I had never taken the time to find out about my own ancestors. Watching that miniseries irrevocably changed that.
The first steps were to grill parents, grandfather, great aunts, and more distant cousins. Sadly, they knew but little of our family history in the days before emancipation, a fact that I came to learn was not uncommon among people of African descent. Visits to both nearby and more distant museums, libraries, and historians gradually revealed tiny bits of the fragmented recorded individual stories. The generous-hearted members of the Kent Branch Genealogical Society, particularly Helen Blackburn, Wendy Barry, and Joan Griffin, although strangers to me at the time, were helpful beyond belief in supplying information and guiding me to the records that might reveal some small detail that would add some “flesh to the bones” of long-deceased relatives.
I first learned of my great-great-great-grandfather, Isaac Brown, thanks to the late Arlie Robbins’s pioneering research on early enslaved families who fled to Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Arlie’s voluminous notes and family trees, deposited in the museum that she helped found in 1967 (then known as The Raleigh Township Centennial Museum now rechristened The Buxton National Historic Site & Museum) included mention of Isaac Brown and his family, all of whom were among the earliest residents of The Elgin Settlement and Buxton Mission, Canada’s largest planned settlement for fugitive slaves.
Months of research added pieces to the puzzle that was Isaac Brown. The search for early tangible details on all of the family members was difficult since the 1851 census for Raleigh Township is lost. Thankfully, the Chatham Kent Registry Office has microfilmed copies of the land transactions, which revealed that on September 3, 1851, Isaac Brown, “yeoman,” bought one acre on the military road that was at the very heart Buxton, comprised of the northern half of Lot 9, Concession 12 in Raleigh Township. He paid Joshua and Elizabeth Shepley “two hundred pounds of lawful money of Canada.” The deed contains a heart-wrenching clause. Although the Shepleys were willing to sell their farm, they could not bear to lose title to a tiny sacred portion, and included the phrase: “excepting a small part of the said half lot containing the graves of three children of said grantor and extending one foot each way beyond the said graves.”
The annual tax records, now housed at the Buxton Museum, thanks to the generous donation of the late Clarence and Cookie Pratt, reveal ever-evolving personal and property information. In 1852, Isaac Brown is listed as fifty-six years old. In addition to his land, he owned two horses worth $20.00 and two cows worth $4.00. By the next year he has acquired an additional fifty acres, across the road from his original purchase.
According to a printed copy of the proceedings, which are held in Cornell University’s amazing Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (much of which is available online), Isaac represented Buxton at a “General Convention for the Improvement of the Colored Inhabitants of Canada” held at the First Baptist Church in Amherstburg on June 16 and 17, 1853. The list of delegates was a who’s who of black community leaders from Amherstburg, Anderdon, Buxton, Colchester, Dresden, and Chatham, all in the southern part of Canada West; as well as from Detroit, Michigan, Madison, Indiana, and from Cleveland, Oberlin, and Urbana, Ohio, in the United States.
Isaac’s status is confirmed by his appointment by his peers to be a member of the Business Committee. After thoughtful deliberation, this committee made recommendations on the subjects of emigration, agriculture, temperance, education, statistics, finances, and a constitution for a Provincial League. The members vilified the United States government for its inhumanity, but praised Queen Victoria and Canada for offering an asylum, and vowed to defend the country whenever called upon. They thanked Harriet Beecher Stowe for her monumental work Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which exposed slavery in a light not previously shown. Showing that they had not forgotten their own past, they agreed to offer a letter of support for a fundraising effort to purchase and free the sister of a Canadian minister who was to be sold from Virginia to the Deep South. They also denounced the system of “begging” that brought shame to the former slaves who wanted to remove any question as to their ambition and independence. Isaac Brown was one of five men appointed to an executive committee to ensure that the recommendations of the conference were carried out and that arrangements be made for a like meeting the following year. These men were also charged with the daunting task “to supervise the general interest of the colored people of Canada.”
By 1854 the Raleigh tax assessor noted that Isaac had two dogs — one of those small details that helps paint a picture of a familial scene. The total property was valued at $325, and, based on that, Isaac was assessed to perform seven days’ statute labour, which was the obligation of each male citizen to perform public work, such as building roads or drainage ditches. According to Raleigh Township published records held by the Buxton Museum, as well as some in my personal collection, on January 29, 1855, the Township Council recognized Isaac for the respect he had earned when they appointed him “Fence Viewer,” to settle property line disputes, oversee proper dimensions of fences, and other such responsibilities. This was an extremely important position at the time as farms were being surveyed out of virgin forest and lot lines were inexactly delineated by an axe’s notch on a tree.
That same year, Isaac and his wife Mary Jane, along with the founder of the Buxton Settlement and their neighbour Reverend William King and his wife Jemima, each mortgaged one of their farms by jointly borrowing four hundred pounds from the Commercial Building and Investment Society of Toronto. On that document, Isaac signed his name rather than making his mark with an X as he had done on his original deed. Also interesting from a human standpoint, the farm that Isaac and Mary Jane mortgaged was now one hundred acres minus an area containing six graves. Perhaps Isaac himself was soon to enlarge that area. The year 1855 is the final time that he, at age fifty-eight, was listed in the tax records. Beginning in 1856, his home farm is listed under his widow Mary Jane Brown and his second farm under his son-in-law Edward Prince, who had married the Browns’ daughter, Eliza.
In the Chatham Public Library’s microfilmed copy of the 1861 personal census, only grandfather Brown’s widow and some of his children appear. Mary Jane Brown, fifty-three years of age, born in the United States, was the head of the household. Her unmarried children still lived with her — Elizabeth, twenty-five and William, twenty, both born in the United States. Their ten-year-old brother, John, was the only one born in Canada West. Also living with them were Peter and Sarah King, twenty-one and twenty, respectively. They were two of the sources of inspiration for Reverend William King to seek out a place in Canada where he could free them, along with their mother and the twelve other slaves that he had either bought or inherited while he lived in Louisiana.
The agricultural census for that year shed further light on what the Brown family’s lives were like in the short time since Isaac’s death. On their home farm they had twenty-one of their one hundred acres under cultivation, fourteen acres under crop, six acres of pasture, and one acre of orchard or garden. Seventy-three acres were still virgin forest. Their land had appreciated considerably and was then valued at $1,410, with an additional $59 worth of farm implements needed to grow their crops of spring wheat, rye, oats, buckwheat, Indian corn, potatoes, turnips, beans, and hay. They now had five cows for beef, three for breeding and for milk, five horses, and eleven pigs.
At that time, daughter Eliza Brown Prince, her husband, three children, and a ten-year-old boy whom the family had taken in, lived beside her husband’s mother, a few miles to the northeast of her parent’s home and just outside of the settlement proper. The Princes would have three more children within the next five years. Tragically, Eliza died in March 1866. All six of her children were under the age of ten. While mourning her daughter, Mary Jane Brown did what grandparents have done throughout history and did what she could to care for her grandchildren.
She and two of her sons joined with her widowed son-in-law, Edward Prince, to take legal action against two unscrupulous men who attempted to take the farm that Isaac Brown had once purchased and that became his daughter Eliza’s inheritance after his death. Chatham lawyer John Van Raay was kind enough to take me to the lawyer’s communal private law library in that city to research that case. Trips to the Archives of Ontario to examine the papers of the presiding judge and to University of Windsor’s Law Library provided more. Before their untimely deaths, both Isaac Brown and his daughter had made the mistake of not properly registering the purchase at the county registry office. It would be three years before the minor Prince children were finally awarded title to their grandfather’s and mother’s farm.
The aging grandmother Brown went even further to express her love by taking two of her grandchildren — the eldest and the youngest — into her home. The youngest grandchild, Alpheus, would eventually be my great-great uncle. It was he who, as an elderly man, left a further clue about Isaac Brown. In an interview with a reporter from The Windsor Daily Star that appeared in the January 15, 1938, edition, he stated that Isaac was a runaway slave who had escaped into a northern state. Although Isaac had died before Alpheus was born, the latter was able to draw on stories that his grandmother had told him when he was a boy. That newspaper, which I found in the archives of the Windsor Star, further fuelled my fascination with this distant ancestor. What was the story behind his enslavement and his escape? Who helped him, if anyone? How and when did he meet his wife? Was she also a slave and were their children? What were the details of his flight to Canada? Could I find out more about their lives in Buxton, on a farm just down the road from my home?
Other details came to light after years of further research. As would be expected, the Brown family attended St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church immediately opposite their home that was superintended by Reverend King. The late Mrs. Kathleen King kindly loaned me the records of the church to confirm that fact. The school and post office were also directly across the road from them, as was the beautiful bronze bell that was donated in November 1850 by the coloured inhabitants of Pittsburgh, who wished to support the bold experiment at Buxton. The Browns lived at the enviable proximity to hear it ring, as tradition has it, whenever a new family successfully arrived from the land of slavery to the Queen’s dominions.
I followed the lives of Mary Jane Brown and all of her children, looking at census, church, property, marriage, birth, baptism, and death records in municipal, provincial, and federal archives. Searches in diaries and the many newspaper articles that carried contemporary stories of Buxton were rarely fruitful for finding specific information on this particular family, but always interesting in general. Letters from neighbours and friends James and John Rapier, which are held in the Moorland Spingarn Archives at Howard University in Washington, D.C., respectfully, mention both Mary Jane Brown and her daughter Eliza.
Many days of wading through American census in the archives of the Allen County Public Library’s Genealogy Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the National Archives in Washington, and several other repositories were disappointing when I could not find the Brown family prior to their coming to Canada. What I did discover was that Isaac Brown’s children and grandchildren occasionally — but not always — gave their parent’s or grandparent’s place of birth as Maryland. When Mary Jane Brown died on September 30, 1883, after suffering from a stroke that left her paralyzed for two weeks, her youngest son, who was the informant for the death certificate, stated that his mother was seventy-eight years old and born in Maryland.
Mention of that particular state raised an exciting possibility when, while looking for something else several years later, I accidentally stumbled across a reference to a document entitled “Case of the Slave Isaac Brown, An Outrage Exposed,” which focused on a slave from Maryland. As any genealogist or historian has experienced, the mere thought that this could possibly be an ancestor was thrilling! Now I had to somehow find a copy of this elusive pamphlet. That was soon achieved after discovering that the Library of Congress had digitized it and made it available on their American Memory website under the heading “Slaves and the Courts, 1740–1860.” While the pamphlet gave a fascinating overview, of course, there was much more to learn.
Luckily at that time (January 2003), I belonged to an international group of Underground Railroad researchers that had been brought together by Denver, Colorado, author Jacqueline Tobin for the purpose of collaborating on the subject. I immediately emailed the list asking for help in locating the pamphlet. The always reliable and eminently knowledgeable Christopher Densmore, curator at the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, replied with a few more details, offering to find a copy of the original and send it to me. He also mentioned that the Pennsylvania Freeman had covered the case.
Reinforcing the notion that it is always a good idea to keep good notes when researching and that it is important to occasionally go through long-forgotten files, I retraced some steps at the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. There, they house two rolls of microfilm that contain the correspondence of the American Missionary Association and the missionaries and teachers in Canada who are under their auspices. Sure enough, there was a letter from Reverend Hiram Wilson, dated in London, Canada West, on August 6, 1847, announcing: “You will rejoice to learn that Isaac Brown (alias Saml Rufsell) with his numerous & interesting family of a wife & 9 children from the house of bondage reached Dawn on the 28th ult. in good health & spirits.” Now I finally knew where the family landed when they came to Canada. Thus began a reinvigorated search for what became of them. How I wished that Hiram Wilson had mentioned them again in his voluminous correspondence and that he would have given the first names of the wife and nine children. But sadly, that was not the case. But at least I knew the name of their husband and father. Reasoning in my own mind that since he had been caught and imprisoned in Philadelphia while using this name, “Samuel Russell” was now a useless alias, particularly since he was now free and safe in Canada, and he would revert to his true identity as “Isaac Brown.” But still, researching anyone with the surname “Brown” was only slightly less challenging (and occasionally overwhelming) than looking for a “Smith” or “Jones.”
Even though I had previously conducted endless research on Isaac Brown, I started at the beginning again, looking for clues that may have been missed previously. Naturally, the logical place to begin was with the Dawn Settlement, the only concrete mention of his location. But I could find no further mention of him — not in the 1851 census, not in the records of the Western District that are held in the Archives of Ontario, not in local newspapers held at the Dresden or Chatham public libraries, not in the Anglican Church Archives of the Diocese of Huron at University of Western Ontario, not in the land records of the Kent County Registry Office, the Chatham-Kent Archives, or in the University of Windsor Archives in the Leddy Library, which holds some early Kent County records. Even the usual techniques of strolling through pioneer cemeteries or browsing marriage, birth, and death records at the provincial archives or Kent Branch Genealogical Society’s collection held no firm evidence. Of course, while using these same sources, I was always watching for “my” Isaac Brown who lived in Buxton, also in the County of Kent. After all, he too was a middle-aged runaway slave with several children who could be identified and had a documented Maryland connection.
Not having much luck in Kent, I repeated the same procedures in other parts of the province, particularly in the Queen’s Bush area where Reverend Samuel Young died and was buried, and where Hiram Wilson seemed to leave a veiled hint about the identity of one man in particular who was inconsolable at Young’s funeral. The Wellington County Museum has a good collection of genealogical information on pioneers of that area. The Ontario Genealogical Society has their province-wide holdings in the Gladys Allison Canadiana Room at the North York Central Branch of the Toronto Public Library. These include transcriptions of tombstones throughout Ontario. Among the things I hoped to find there was evidence of a monument for the guardian angel, Reverend Young, but it was not to be. Nor was there one for Isaac or Susannah.
The pamphlet on the Pennsylvania court case of the slave Isaac Brown opened up vast possibilities for research on the American side of the border. Old friends, whom my wife Shannon, who is curator of the Buxton National Historic Site & Museum, and I have been fortunate to meet over the years, gladly offered their expertise and suggestions. Foremost among them was Charles Brewer, a superb historian who lives in Washington, D.C., the home of archival gold mines. As he always does, Charles jumped in with both feet and examined many records on my behalf over a period of years. He is imaginative in thinking of what to look for, well-connected with other historians and repositories, and familiar with records that most people would not even think of pursuing. Generous and humble, he deserves my sincerest gratitude for the many things that he contributed to this as well as to my previous book.
Dennis Gannon, another historian, who could be described with much the same words, is the premier authority on Hiram Wilson and extremely knowledgeable on the broader subject of black history. Dennis graciously shared volumes of his own research, allowing me to get to know the missionary who guided the Brown family into Canada and offered them their first home in freedom.
Thankfully, the Isaac Brown story had grabbed headlines in many newspapers across North America. I would like to recognize some of the repositories that hold microfilmed copies of some of these that I used in researching this story: The Leddy Library at University of Windsor; Purdy/Kresge Library, Wayne State University, Detroit; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; Central Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia; Maryland State Archives; Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania; and Weldon Library at University of Western Ontario, London. As time has gone on, more newspapers have been digitized and are available online by subscription: Accessible Archives and other historical newspaper collections through Godfrey Memorial Library, Genealogy Bank, and New Orleans Times-Picayune. OurOntario.ca Community Newspapers Collection has the two major black Canadian newspapers —Voice of the Fugitive and Provincial Freeman — online for free.
In early 2005, I decided to contact the Calvert County (Maryland) Historical Society to ask if they knew anything more on either Isaac Brown or Alexander Somerville. Archivist Karen Sykes quickly responded that she was not aware of the case but, intrigued by the story, forwarded my email to Kirsti Uunila, historic preservation planner at the Calvert County Department of Planning and Zoning. Kirsti, in turn, contacted Ms. Pat Melville, archivist for the Maryland State Archives, also known as The Hall of Records. All were excited by the story and Pat decided to further research the saga by using the collections at her disposal. In addition to her position as archivist, Pat was also editor of the archive’s interdepartmental newsletter, The Archivist’s Bulldog. In that role, she wrote and published an article, Slave Isaac Brown: A Case of Legal Maneuvering in honour of Black History Month. She credited Millington Longwood, a staff member from the Maryland Underground Railroad Project, with assisting in the research. I would like to thank both Pat and Millington for their work and for uncovering and sending me some new details that I had not seen. I also appreciate the assistance of several other staff at the Maryland State Archives, including Chris Haley, on our numerous trips to their facility. Calvert County’s Karen Sykes and Kirsti Uunila deserve special mention for their interest, encouragement, and help over a period that extended well beyond our initial contact. The County Courthouse had been destroyed by fire in 1882, so any records that they may have held about Isaac Brown or Alexander Somerville were lost. Therefore, the help of these historians who are working to uncover this history from the ashes is invaluable.
The next exciting development came quickly thereafter. Our friend Tony Burroughs, who is probably the most well-known and qualified genealogist specializing in African-American research, contacted me and suggested that I submit a request to a new Canadian television series called Ancestors in the Attic, asking them to focus one of their programs on an interesting case of an enslaved ancestor who fled to freedom. I took him up on that advice, hoping to find out once and for all if the two Isaac Browns were indeed the same person, and soon heard back from Chris Robinson, one of the producers. They assigned the Isaac Brown story as “Case #162” and were eager to pursue it. I supplied all of the information — by then a hefty amount — that I had accumulated to that point. By March 2006, Ancestors had hired genealogists in Pennsylvania and Ottawa, and Chris and I were in constant contact. Stephanie Hoover did some of the work in Pennsylvania and Patricia Kennedy conducted extensive investigation at Library and Archives Canada on the Executive Council and Lord Elgin’s records, as well as the civil secretary’s correspondence. Related to Patricia’s search are the Records of the Governor General’s Office, also known as Despatches to and from the Colonial Office (RG7-G-1, microfilm C160) and the papers of James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, then governor general of Canada, which are published in Elgin-Grey Papers, 1846–1852 by J.O. Patenaude, Ottawa, 1937, both of which I was able to access at the Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario.
Arrangements were made for the director and crew to come to Buxton on June 6, 2005, and film the episode with the museum as the backdrop. On June 5, I was dying to know what hidden gems they were going to spring on me the next day. It was then that I received a call, apologizing that they were unable to find any other substantial details beyond what I or Charles Brewer had already uncovered. There would be no “Aha!” moment to commit to film so the shoot was cancelled at the eleventh hour. Oh well, it was an interesting experience. Keep on digging.
One great thing happened as an indirect result of the investigation by the historians who had been engaged by the television producers, however inadvertent it may have been. Jenny Masur, a friend we had met periodically over the years who is the National Capital Region coordinator for the National Parks Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, learned of the search for Isaac Brown and my connection to it. She contacted Karen James, coordinator for Underground Railroad History for the Pennsylvania Bureau of Archives and History, who was doing work with Philadelphia court records. The timing was perfect. Karen had discovered a series of rich documents housed at the Pennsylvania State Archives, indexed under RG-26 Extradition Files, in the Papers of the Governors. Among those records were arrest warrants for Isaac Brown from both Pennsylvania and Maryland, testimony from the slave traders who tried to assist in returning Brown to Maryland, letters from Brown’s Quaker lawyers and supporters and — most importantly — the testimony of Isaac Brown’s wife and daughter! Finally, I would be able to identify them. Although I had never met this thoughtful and wonderful person who contacted me out of the blue, I seem to recall developing an instant crush on Karen James, but don’t tell my wife.
When Karen’s package arrived in the mail on May 24, 2006, it felt like Christmas morning. The copies of the original documents were rich with more information. In a way that typescript can never do, the handwritten letters gave a more intimate feel for the terror experienced by Isaac Brown and his family and for the passionate support given to them by others. I felt the indignation of the Calvert County Grand Jury as they passed sentence on the fugitive slave who was then held in a Philadelphia jail, the cool official detachment of Governor Pratt as he requested that Brown be extradited back to Maryland, the pain in the testimony of daughter Lucinda as she relived her time that she and her father spent in the Prince Frederick Jail, and the injustice of it all that had descended on wife Susannah.
As suggested above, the most exciting detail was the identification of the daughter as “Lucinda Brown” and the wife as “Susanna [sic] Brown.” It was a minor disappointment that the wife’s name was not “Mary Jane,” the name of my great-great-great grandmother, as I had expected it to be. But by then I was so captivated by the family and their story that it seemed relatively unimportant. At least now I could return to my research in Canada West in search of a Lucinda (or any variations like Lucy or Cindy) Brown and Susanna (or variations Susannah, Sue, Susan, Hannah or Anna) Brown. Many more months of searching for them proved futile. The thought crept into my mind that, as researchers find over and over again, the same people appear in different documents with different first names, usually explained by having an official first name at birth, but being commonly called by a middle name or names. Just one example is found in Karolyn Smardz Frost’s award-winning book I’ve Got A Home In Glory Land in which the heroine is called “Ruthie” in early documents, but is “Lucie” after she came north, eventually into Canada. In the absence of finding any record of a “Susannah Brown,” there was still a faint possibility that she was the same person as “Mary Jane Brown” from Maryland and married to Isaac Brown.
After seemingly exhausting the Canadian sources, I returned my focus to the United States. One evening in early 2010, while passing time at the Purdy/Kresge Library at Wayne State University, trying to kill an hour or two before a Civil War television documentary screening, I casually browsed through a microfilm of a New York City abolitionist newspaper, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, when I had one of those few and far between “Eureka!” moments. The September 30, 1847, edition carried a remarkably lengthy and detailed account of Isaac Brown and family’s flight to Canada in company with Reverend Samuel Young, who provided the first-hand information. He mentioned the complete route that they had taken, the people who helped, and those who interfered. He supplied personal details such as Susannah’s illness in Buffalo, which he described as “the mother was broken down,” and their additional three-day delay in Detroit as they tried to find a boat to take them to Lake St. Clair. And there were touching scenes of a stranger in Rochester who, upon hearing Brown’s story, offered to donate a wood stove to warm his family once they reached their final destination. Those images made me want to travel much of the same route and see some of the things that they might have seen. So off we went days later, with Shannon, who was always a tremendous help and supporter in preparing this book, being the other half of “we.”
We drove through Buffalo and Rochester to observe and absorb that part of the route. Our first stop was Syracuse, New York, for a visit to the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Library to re-examine The Gerrit Smith Papers and to look for additional information on Reverend Luther Lee, whom the Browns met along the way. We next went to the abolitionist hotbed of Boston, where the family began their westward journey to Canada. Two extraordinary scholars and special people were connected with this leg of our trip. Kate Clifford Larson, professor in the Department of History at Simmons College and author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, not only supplied tips for our research, but met us, guided us through Boston’s historic districts, and welcomed us into her home. Kate also introduced me to Kathryn Grover, historian and author from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Like Kate, Kathryn has an extensive range of interests and expertise and is one of those generous souls who share both. Many of our Boston and later New York City stops were based on Kathryn’s recommendations, and we were not disappointed.
The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) is appropriately housed in an elegant old New England building. There, we looked through papers of individuals who were involved in the Isaac Brown case, including the William Lloyd Garrison Papers and those of Edmund Quincy, which are in the Quincy, Wendell, Holmes and Upham Family Papers, as well as those of some of their contemporary abolitionist friends who could have been involved, such as the Theodore Parker Papers and Samuel May Papers. Letters of Francis Jackson are also scattered in some of the collections. Records of the Underground Railroad organization, the Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League, were interesting to look at, but did not mention Isaac Brown. The papers of Amos A. Lawrence provided some insight on his assistance to the Dawn Settlement and his support and correspondence with Hiram Wilson’s co-worker, Josiah Henson. The MHS also has an extensive collection of photographs of American abolitionists, many of which they have placed online and some of whom appear in this book.
The Houghton Library at Harvard University houses The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission Records and those of one of its commissioners, Samuel Gridley Howe, in the Howe Family Papers. Howe visited Chatham (as well as other black centres in Canada West) in 1863 and interviewed many of its residents. Unfortunately, the name Isaac Brown/Samuel Russell did not appear in either of those collections. However, in the microfilm collection of the Lamont Library next door to Houghton, those interviews do appear as part of War Department, Letters Received by the Adjutant General. Luckily, a black man from Toronto named Thomas Smallwood was interviewed, and he recalled some intimate details of the Brown case, including the fact that Isaac Brown was arrested in Philadelphia after having sent a letter to his grown-up son who remained in Maryland. Smallwood’s words suggested that he had met with Samuel Young when the minister was on his way to Montreal to meet with Lord Elgin. The original papers are housed at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., as a part of Record Group 94.
The Boston Public Library has an incredible anti-slavery collection that is card-indexed by correspondent and by place. While there we looked at a wide variety of materials, but far too often became sidetracked from the original goal. However, I focused long enough to read the appropriate date range when Isaac Brown would have been in Boston in the diary of Edmund Quincy that spanned 1824–50, and read letters from Francis Jackson, Samuel May, Sydney Howard Gay, and Edmund Quincy. The microfilmed Anti-Slavery Collection, 18th–19th Centuries, originally from the Library of the Society of Friends, is a huge and interesting set of documents.
From Boston we travelled to the Rare Book & Manuscript Library within the Butler Library at Columbia University in New York City. The staff person who dealt with us was an absolute delight. As Kathryn Grover had suggested, The Sydney Howard Gay Papers were an amazing collection. Gay was the editor of The National Anti-Slavery Standard, and, as mentioned previously, knew intimate details of Isaac Brown’s case. Unfortunately, Gay has been an almost forgotten figure in the anti-slavery movement, but even a perfunctory look at his papers proves that he is worthy of much more acclaim. That will inevitably come when some scholar reveals the contents of this collection to the historical community, thus bringing Gay into the company of revered figures such as William Still, Thomas Garrett, Levi Coffin, and others of that ilk.
After a brief stop in Connecticut at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, we continued on to Philadelphia. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has the huge collection, The Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society: 1775–1975, where we found many nuggets related to the Brown case and the lawyers who assisted him. Photos of Moyamensing Prison and records of The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons were also illuminating to get a feel for the experiences of the prisoners. The Central Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia holds microfilmed copies of most of the city newspapers, which were a rich source of information. The newspapers we scoured there were: Commercial List & Philadelphia Price Current, Germantown Telegraph, North American & U.S. Gazette, Pennsylvania Freeman, Pennsylvanian Weekly, Philadelphia Bulletin, Philly Inquirer, and U.S. Gazette.
One of the most pleasurable stops was to the offices of the United States National Parks Service. After meeting and sharing the Isaac Brown story with Coxey Toogood, historian of Interpretation and Visitors Services at Independence National Historical Park, and Rick Starr, education program developer, we were treated to a personalized, behind-the-scenes tour of Independence Hall and Congress Hall where the court hearings took place. It was gripping to picture the manacled prisoner hopelessly cowering before the judges who looked down on him from their lofty bench. Special also was a visit to Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, just minutes away on foot from 172 Pine, the narrow street where Isaac Brown lived and was first arrested. The Browns may very well have attended this historic church and at the very least would have known many of its members.
Just a few miles outside of Philadelphia is Swarthmore College, and on the campus grounds with all of its Old World charm is The Friends Historical Library. The presence of Lucretia Mott, one of the college’s founders, is still palpable there, most dramatically manifested with a marble bust. Within the Special Collections Department, Christopher Densmore guided us through their collection of the Mott Manuscripts, 1831–1959 and the Abby Hopper Gibbons Papers. Swarthmore has also joined with two other Quaker colleges, Haverford and Bryn Mawr, to digitize records under the title “Quakers & Slavery” and make them freely accessible to everyone at http://trilogy.brynmawr.edu/speccoll/quakersandslavery. Among those records are the letters of Isaac Tatum Hopper, who, along with other family members, was involved in the Brown rescue.
Next on our itinerary was the H. Furlong Baldwin Library of The Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore to study the 1832 Census for Free People of Color that was contained in a much larger collection Maryland State Colonization Society Papers, 1827–1871. Knowing that Susannah Brown, as well as any children born to her at that time would have been free, I hoped to be able to locate her and thereby find the names of more of her children. Unfortunately, neither her name nor Lucinda’s appeared in the list for Calvert County. However, there was a Mary Brown who, judging by other research evidence, lived in the immediate vicinity of Alexander Somerville. Henry Harrison, the sheriff of the county who took the census, recorded Mary as twenty-five years old, just the right age to be my ancestor, Mary Jane Brown. Perhaps …
The Colonization Papers also include registers of manumissions and lists where owners have agreed to free their slaves upon their reaching a certain age. Separated by county, the names of the slaves are registered beside that of their owner. Many hours were spent both in Baltimore and at Wayne State University going through those thirty-one rolls of microfilm trying to find a “Susannah” in Calvert County who may have had her freedom registered, and also for a registration by Alexander Somerville, which would confirm the promise that was widely reported that he would free Isaac Brown upon reaching the age of thirty-five. If that could be found, it might include the name of Isaac’s unfortunate brother whom Somerville had killed while enraged at his slave for having returned too late from his wedding. Unfortunately, those particular records do not appear in this collection. My thanks go to assistant librarian Jennifer Copeland for her help with these records and to Jerry M. Hynson for publishing Free African Americans of Maryland 1832 (Willow Bend Books, Winchester, Maryland, 2000), which first made me aware of this census.
After leaving Baltimore, we went to Washington, D.C., where we visited the Manuscript Reading Room in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress to check the American Missionary Association Papers for correspondence of those abolitionists, including Hiram Wilson, who had a relationship with Isaac Brown. Knowing how closely knit the anti-slavery community was, we explored the papers of other possible confidantes such as Lewis Tappan, George Whipple, and William Harned. (The Robarts Library in Toronto has the two microfilmed reels of Canadian correspondence only, but the Library of Congress, as well as the University of Maryland Library and perhaps a few other institutions, has the complete collection of 261 reels. The originals are housed at Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans.) The Lewis Tappan Papers are also held in the former, and several other repositories, including The Dana Porter Library at the University of Waterloo (Ontario), hold microfilmed copies. Thanks also to the staff at the newspaper room in the Library of Congress for checking for and retrieving some of the “penny newspapers” that were held off-site, such as Cummings’ Evening Telegraphic Bulletin and Spirit of the Times and Daily Keystone, the latter of which extensively covered the Brown legal case in Philadelphia.
Next, with Charles Brewer on board, we travelled to Calvert County to see the land where Isaac Brown and family once lived. Alexander Somerville’s plantations are now within the fenced-off grounds of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. Unfortunately, since the tragedy of 9/11, the public is no longer allowed within the gates. However, we did get to see the countryside and feel some of its memories. It was particularly moving to walk through the bucolic cemetery where Alexander Somerville, his wife, and family members are buried. As luck would have it, an elderly couple who are parishioners at the Middleham Chapel arrived about the same time and kindly invited us in while they tidied the church for Sunday’s service. Their justifiable pride in their historic church was warming and I hope that they will forgive me for having forgotten their names so I could properly thank them here. The imposing stained glass that bears the names of Alexander and Cornelia Olivia Somerville is truly impressive. Funny how seeing that window and looking at their tombstones in that beautiful setting diminished any ill feelings that I might have unconsciously harboured for the man who caused so much pain to the family I had came to love. The combination of looking at those symbols of remembrance and their reminders of the passage of time put things into a different perspective and dispersed a peaceful melancholy.
Detroit was the final United States leg of the Browns’ flight before entering Canada. My admiration goes to John Palacsek, curator of Marine History at Dossein Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle in Detroit, for immediately recognizing the names of both the captain and the ship that carried the family across Lake Erie, and my thanks to him for sharing his knowledge of Captain Shepherd’s abolitionist activities. A better understanding of the Michigan anti-slavery movement and of Charles H. Stewart is provided by the good folks at Ann Arbor District Library who have digitized the Signal of Liberty newspaper and made it freely available at http://signalofliberty.aadl.org. It was somewhat disappointing that there was no mention of Brown’s passage through Detroit in published reports or interviews done with members of the Colored Vigilance Committee, including William Lambert (Detroit Tribune, January 17, 1887) and George de Baptiste (Detroit Post, May 14, 1870).
Distance and a shortage of time (and money) prevented travelling to some of the places I would have like to have gone, so I would like to express my gratitude to the people who examined their collections and responded to my queries. Judy Bolton, the head of public services of the Special Collections at Louisiana State University Library in Baton Rouge, checked the Kenner Family Papers for mention of Isaac Brown during the short time that he was in the New Orleans area and briefly belonged to William Butler Kenner. Matthew Turi, manuscripts reference librarian at the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, looked through the Francis Rawn Shunk Papers to see if the governor of Pennsylvania had mentioned Brown in private correspondence. Dennis Gannon, Marie Carter, Karolyn Smardz Frost, and Blair Newby generously shared letters from The Hiram Wilson Papers housed in Ohio’s Oberlin College Library Archives. A historian at Historic New England, Quincy House, in Quincy, Massachusetts, also shared some of her knowledge of one-time resident, Josiah Quincy, who provided the train ticket to the Browns and Reverend Young as they departed from the east.
One of my deepest regrets and sincerest appreciation goes to Charlene Mires, associate professor of history at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Charlene’s graduate students worked on a project about court cases at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and adjacent Congress Hall. Their collected work was published internally as In Pursuit of Liberty: African American Court and Prison Stories from Philadelphia, 1820’s–1840’s. One of the students, Kristi Johnston, wrote an article on Isaac Brown. I applaud Charlene and all of her students for their investigative work and thank them for helping me better understand the Philadelphia court system. I express my regret that time and uncertainty of schedule did not allow me to accept their thoughtful invitation to meet with them and have an event that celebrated Isaac Brown. I would like to also extend a second word of thanks to Coxey Toogood, who assisted in initiating the project at Villanova and who kindly invited me to share the Brown story at a training session for her interpretive staff. We hope that we can arrange this sometime in the near future.
After returning from our trip and completing the story with the new information we had gathered, there remained an overwhelming, disturbing thought — what became of this family after they arrived in Canada? It was tempting to conclude that, in all likelihood, this must be the same Isaac Brown as my ancestor. But conjecture is never good enough. I decided to use Ancestry.com one more time to try to track this family down, only this time doing a search from 1850 to 1881 (without using a surname) in both Canada and the United States for any and all families that had both a “Lucinda” and a “Susannah.”
Voila! In the 1861 census for Chatham, there was indeed both a daughter “Lucinda” and mother “Susannah” living in the same household. And, as you already know from reading this book, the head of the household was “Samuel Russell” — the same name that Isaac Brown had adopted when he first fled from slavery. So many months wasted and the name was before me all of the time. The emotion that I experienced was relief, mixed with a teaspoon of joy, and cup full of embarrassment that it took so long to find this answer. Perhaps that error in judgment can be partially explained and forgiven because, as we will soon see, the father was called Isaac Brown in one more official Ontario document. At any rate, this new information required retracing many steps, now researching the surname “Russell.” New leads included examining the Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers held privately and generously shared by Edward and Maxine Robbins.
Over the course of researching this story, there were many archivists, librarians, historians, and others who listened, made suggestions, or helped in some way. I know that some were missed in this chapter and hope that they do not think me unkind or unappreciative. Thank you all.
On the production side of this book, thanks go to Darcy Marlow, assistant registrar at Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for granting permission for the cover image Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia, painted by Thomas Moran in 1862. Jennifer Gallinger designed the cover and my appreciation is extended to her, to president Kirk Howard for believing in the merits of this project, to managing editor Shannon Whibbs for toiling on the final copy edits, as well as to all of the staff members at Dundurn who contributed in any way to this publication, particularly to two people who I have long admired and who championed this project — Barry Penhale, publisher emeritus, and wife, Jane Gibson, editor.
Final words of gratitude are reserved for a few special people: friends Lori Gardiner and Charles Brewer, wife Shannon and children Christopher, Justin, Melanie, and Rebecca for proofreading this manuscript, securing permissions for images, and for their unflagging support.