7.
escaping bondage and maroon colonies
“I never saw the day since I knew anything that I didn’t want to be free,” remembered Anthony Bingey.
“Among the good trades I learned was the art of running away to perfection. I made a regular business of it,” wrote Henry Bibb.
Beginning with the first arrivals from Africa, enslaved men and women fled their enslavers and overseers. Enslavers, said one, would “rather a negro do anything else than run away.” People in bondage left more lenient enslavers and cruel ones, easy work and hard. James Christian was not permitted to marry the woman of his choice. He fled a relaxed life in President John Tyler’s White House.
Most enslaved people seeking freedom abandoned plantation work on the spur of the moment. These men and women were trying to escape a beating, prevent a sale to a new owner, or search for nearby relatives and loved ones. Many ran to protest work, whippings, or evil overseers—and tried to remain hidden until they won promises of better conditions.
Others carefully planned to reach free land, and some tried to establish their own settlements in remote, hard-to-penetrate swamps or mountains. From the New England Articles of Confederation in 1643 forward, European enslavers legally bound themselves to assist in the recapture of any enslaved person seeking freedom. Enslavers had this pledge written into the US Constitution and two federal Fugitive Slave acts. “Slave-hunting” was to be carried out by federal marshals and the US Army if necessary.
A man and a woman prepare to defend their family from “slave-hunters.”
Enslavers would not tolerate any gap in their defense system. They bitterly resented Native American nations for accepting African Americans into their villages and were furious about an American Indian adoption system that drew no color line. To seal off this escape hatch, Europeans demanded in treaties that American Indian nations agree to return all formerly enslaved people living in their communities. In 1721, the governor of Virginia had the Five Civilized Nations promise to surrender formerly enslaved people, and in 1726, the governor of New York made the Iroquois Confederacy take the same pledge. In 1746, the Hurons promised, and the next year the Delawares promised. None returned a single man, woman, or child. Many nations made clear they stood ready to fight for African men and women who had become their relatives and loved ones.
Along the Atlantic coast and spreading westward through woods and over mountains to the Mississippi, two dark races began to blend and marry. Artist George Catlin, writing in the 1830s, called the children of this mixture “the finest and most powerful men I have ever yet seen.” From New England to the Carolinas, and westward to Minnesota, enslavers had to confront guerrilla forces born of these American alliances in the woods.
The strongest US coalition of Indigenous and Black people flowered in Florida around 1776. Africans seeking freedom from plantations in Georgia became the peninsula’s first settlers and were soon joined by Seminoles fleeing oppression by the Creek nation. The alliance was solidified when the Africans taught the newcomers methods of rice cultivation learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone, Africa.
The two peoples developed a prosperous and peaceful farming and grazing economy. They also built a military alliance based on potent guerrilla strike forces. Enslavers in Georgia and the Carolinas saw these successful, armed Black communities acting as a beacon to draw off their slaves. They feared armed uprisings that could destroy their system of slavery.
In Florida, armed resistance by free Africans, enslaved people seeking freedom, and Seminole Indians began around 1776. This European print shows an African leader of these combined forces.
To crush the alliance, Florida was repeatedly invaded by US posses and troops hunting enslaved people and was finally purchased by the United States in 1819. Florida’s African Seminoles led in challenging the US in pitched battles and guerrilla resistance.
Between 1816 and 1858, the Black and Native soldiers of the Seminole nation held the US Army, Navy, and Marines at bay. The cost of these Florida wars for the United States was $40 million, with fifteen hundred servicemen dead. At times half of the US Army was deployed against the Seminole military alliance.
Whether it was to join the resistance in Florida, flee to relatives, or reach freedom in the North or West, the decision to escape filled hearts with fear. Lewis Clarke recalled: “All the white part of mankind, that he has ever seen, are enemies to him and all his kindred. How can he venture where none but white faces shall greet him?” The mere thought of abandoning wives, husbands, children, and loved ones deterred many, delayed others, and filled the moment with pain. In 1850, a New York convention of fugitive enslaved people recalled the decision:
So galling was our bondage, that to escape from it, we suffered the loss of all things, and braved every peril, and endured every hardship. Some of us left parents, some wives, some children. Some of us were wounded with guns and dogs, as we fled. Some of us secreted ourselves in the suffocating holds of ships. Nothing was so dreadful to us as slavery.
To compound their problems, Black people were denied a knowledge of geography and fed calculated lies. William Johnson of Virginia was told the Detroit River was three thousand miles wide. Sidney Allen, an engineer on his enslaver’s boat, was told that in Canada “nothin’ but black-eyed peas could be raised.” Susie King heard Yankees would hitch Black people to carts instead of horses.
The entire white South was taught to be alert for people who had escaped bondage, and enslavers were ready to dispatch armed posses. Regular patrols, the pattyrollers, were drafted for six cents an hour, a militia that nightly searched in the woods and hills for people escaping slavery.
Some men ran thriving businesses raising and training bloodhounds for these hunts. Dan McCowan advertised: “My hounds is well trained, and I have had 15 yeres experience. My rates is 10 dullers per hed of ketched in the beate where the master lives; 15 dullers in the county, and 50 dullers out of the county.” One trained bloodhound cost $300, but it was worth it to enslavers when fleeing enslavement became an epidemic.
Tracking enslaved people on the run was a dangerous and difficult job. “Some of ’em would rather be shot than be took,” a white worker told reporter Olmsted. One deputy armed with a warrant followed his man into Virginia’s Dismal Swamp only to find him standing neck deep in water. The deputy quietly returned to headquarters, erased the man’s name from the warrant, and wrote “Seeable but not Comeatable.”
Enslavers often advertised for enslaved people running to freedom in local newspapers. These descriptions reveal some important truths about people—their skills, their abilities to read, write, and speak Native American or foreign languages, their determined efforts to reach loved ones.
Enslaved people on the run were described as bearing the scars of beatings, whippings, or brandings (“R” for those who ran before). It was clear what they were running from. Cut into the backs of men and women was the evidence of resistance. Sarah Grimké told of a teenage seamstress who ran away so often she was whipped until her back was lacerated. Then a “heavy iron collar, with three prongs projecting from it, was placed around her neck . . . to serve as a mark to describe her, in case of escape.”
Enslavers described some running to freedom as “impudent and insolent,” “notorious,” or “unruly scoundrels.” But others were called humble, cheerful, and loyal men and women who “had no reason to leave.” In 1846, a Louisiana enslaver wrote of three enslaved people who had run away: the first “very industrious” and “always answered with a smile”; the second “an industrious boy” who spoke to whites “very humbly, with his hand to his hat”; the third also addressed whites “humbly and respectfully with a smile.”
A study of southern newspapers from 1732 to 1790 found that there were 7,846 people running from enslavement advertised, and the vast majority were young men. But women, including those who were pregnant, carrying infants, or leading small children, numbered 10 percent in Maryland, 12 percent in Virginia and North Carolina, and more than 18 percent in Georgia and South Carolina. In South Carolina, for example, 3,746 enslaved people seeking freedom were men, 698 were women (including 14 who were pregnant), and 122 were children.
These notices described Africans who fled in the company of white indentured servants or received help from whites or free Blacks. But most were on their own. In 1785, a South Carolina planter advertised for four generations of women—a grandmother, mother, and daughter “with a young child.” In 1789, a Romeo and a Juliet fled together from slavery in Virginia. The next year four men and two women fled Georgia. One, Sue, was “lame with rheumatism,” but managed to carry her three children: Juno (ten), Sarah (seven), and Dolly (three).
Sometimes large numbers fled together. In 1779, thirty-six, including twelve women, escaped together from the Edings plantation on Edisto Island, Georgia. Writing a year and a half after they left, Mr. Edings optimistically promised any “returning home of their own accord will be forgiven.” In 1826, twenty-seven enslaved people in Kentucky were being transported down the Ohio River by boat when they broke away. Swinging clubs, axes, and knives, they killed five whites, seized and sank the boat, and fled to Indiana. In 1830, a white complained that in four North Carolina counties enslaved people “come and go as they please, and if an attempt is made to stop them, they immediately fly to the woods . . . for months.”
Mass flights to freedom were more common in the border states of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, and Delaware than the deep South. In 1826, a large number of people seeking their freedom boarded a boat and sailed to the north during a Portsmouth, Virginia, celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In 1845, some men and women from two Maryland counties armed themselves with clubs, swords, knives, a pistol, and a gun and began a march northward. They were captured.
Mass escapes were not uncommon. These twenty-eight people fled eastern Maryland.
In August 1848, Patrick Doyle, a white Danville, Ohio, college student, organized a band of seventy-five armed Black men in Kentucky heading toward the Ohio River. They fought two pitched battles with posses before being captured. Three Black leaders were executed, and Doyle was sentenced to twenty years in jail. These massive escapes could be classified as armed revolts.
Some individuals were fearless of punishments. They fled repeatedly or dared the impossible. A couple, Remus and Patty, fled a Battle, Alabama, plantation in 1836 only to be captured and jailed in Montgomery. They escaped to Georgia, were recaptured in Columbus, and again escaped, this time for good. In 1842, an enslaved man named Abraham cleverly forged his own freedom papers in Mobile, Alabama, and reached Baltimore. When he was arrested, his imitation documents fooled a judge and he was released and reached the North.
Six men escaped from Key West, Florida, in 1858 in a small boat and sailed to the Bahamas. They decided to write their enslavers. Most wrote insulting letters, a few apologized for taking his good horse, and one signed his letter “Your most obedient servant.” Sometimes formerly enslaved people sent enslavers bills for their labor.
Trouble stalked the road to freedom. Teenagers William and Charles Parker fled Maryland only to be confronted by three whites who knew they were freedom seekers. The Black youths chased them off, but had to run as “every house was lighted up” and “we heard people talking and horses galloping this way and that way.” The brothers finally reached safety in Pennsylvania.
Some trips took a long time. In Texas, a hunter of enslaved people told of chasing a man on the run for weeks: “We caught him once, but he got away . . . he gave me a kick in the face, and broke. I had my six-shooter handy, and I tried to shoot him, but every barrel missed fire. . . . We shot at him three times with rifles, but he’d got too far off. . . . We chased him and my dog got close to him once . . . but he had a dog himself, and . . . it bit my dog.” The Black man reached Mexico, where slavery had been abolished in 1829.
In 1855, young Ann Wood led a Christmas Eve flight of her friends from Virginia, but they were surrounded by an armed posse. Wood calmly raised her double-barreled pistol, waved a long knife, and told the whites to step aside or blood would flow that night. The posse galloped off, and Ann Wood and friends reached Philadelphia.
At least two African Americans had friends ship them to freedom from southern cities. Henry Brown climbed into a box in Richmond, Virginia, and had a white friend mail him to the Philadelphia antislavery office. Sometimes he traveled upside down, but he survived to write a book and to become a national hero. William Peel Jones climbed into a box in Baltimore and spent seventeen hours in a steamboat before reaching Philadelphia.
Ann Wood and her companions drive off “slave-hunters.”
Escape disguises and techniques ranged from clever to ingenious. Black people pretended to be free or white, men became women, and women men. Some, dressed as sailors, took jobs on ships. People running to freedom threw off the scent of bloodhounds with pepper, dead fish, or by rubbing graveyard bones on their clothes. Some pretended to ask whites for directions, then headed along another road. Others escaped on rafts built from fence posts and across bridges built from sleds.
From Tennessee, Mr. and Mrs. John Little walked to Chicago. Mrs. Little, who was seventeen at the time, later remembered: “My shoes gave out before many days—then I wore my husband’s old shoes till they were used up. Then we came barefoot all the way to Chicago. My feet were so blistered and sore and my ankles swollen, but I had to keep on. There was something driving me.”
People escaping from enslavement sometimes built a new life for themselves in nearby woods or a far-off wilderness. A woman named Tamar lived in a forest and sometimes secretly hid under the floor of her enslaved mother’s hut. “Her husband would sometimes spend part of the night with her and get back before sunrise. . . . We all supplied her,” recalled a relative. Tamar had three children while living the life of an outlaw. Cornelia Carney recalled her father, who was beaten every time he ran away, decided to live in the woods with a cousin and another man. Saturday night or Sunday after whites left for church, he would return to his family.
Maria Weems escaped slavery dressed as a man.
Some seeking freedom who could not reach Florida or the North began their own maroon colonies. They planted crops, hunted for game, and reared and educated families in parts of the Allegheny Mountains or Blue Ridge Mountains where posses had trouble penetrating. About two hundred people lived in the thirty-mile-long, fifteen-mile-wide Great Dismal Swamp, which stretches from Virginia into North Carolina. In 1842, a New Orleans paper reported three hundred people—“all armed”— lived in three nearby swamp areas.
Octave Johnson, twenty-one, had been raised as a cooper and treated well. He had seen his mother sold away when he was a teenager. Threatened by an overseer, Johnson fled from New Orleans to live as a maroon for a year and a half. His tale of maroon life, dictated to a US Army officer in 1864, reveals the kind of daring cooperation between men and women it took to survive behind an armed enemy: “I had to steal my food; took turkeys, chickens, and pigs; before I left, our number had increased to thirty, of whom ten were women; we were four miles in the rear of the plantation house; sometimes we would rope the beef cattle and drag them to our hiding place; we obtained matches from our friends on the plantation; we slept on logs and burned cypress leaves to make a smoke and keep away mosquitoes; Eugene Jardeau, master of hounds, hunted for us for three months; often those at work would betray those in the swamp, for fear of being implicated in their escape; we furnished meat to our fellow-servants in the field, who would return corn meal; one day twenty hounds came after me; I called the party to my assistance and we killed eight of the bloodhounds.”
One of history’s most complicated and daring escapes was planned by William and Ellen Craft in Georgia. In 1848, the Crafts decided to leave because they wanted to have a baby in freedom. Ellen, almost white in complexion, cut her hair short and dressed in the clothing of her enslaver. Claiming she had a toothache, she wrapped her beardless face in a shawl. William was “his” servant.
They took enough money to travel by railroad and steamer and stayed at the best hotels. Since Ellen could not write, she carried her right arm in a sling so she had an excuse not to sign hotel registers. Dark glasses, a slight limp, a cane, and a pretense of partial deafness helped Ellen avoid conversations that could give her away. She was a sick young man, journeying north for medical treatment and in true aristocratic style, attended by her Black servant. Despite all her careful preparations, several times she barely avoided exposure.
In Philadelphia, the Vigilance Committee provided guards and spirited the couple to Boston. In an African American boarding-house the Crafts had a legal marriage performed by abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. He concluded the ceremony by handing the groom a sword “to save his wife’s liberty.” The couple left to build their family in the safety of England.
For the Crafts and most others, flight was an act of reckless daring, yet an estimated thirty thousand escaped in the decades before the Civil War. Enslaved people escaping to freedom had to depend almost entirely on their own wits. Robert Purvis, a Black abolitionist who assisted those who reached Philadelphia, reported, “Many of the fugitives required no other help than advice and direction how to proceed.”
White abolitionists helped, but African American communities in the South proved crucial. Purvis recalled: “The most efficient helpers or agents we had were two market-women, who lived in Baltimore.”
“Ham and Eggs,” the code name for a Black agent in Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to William Still, underground railroad leader in Philadelphia: “I want you to know that I feel as much determined to work in the glorious cause, as ever I did in the all of my life, and I have some very good hams on hand that I would like very much for you to have.”
Eliza Baines of Portsmouth, Virginia, placed enslaved people seeking freedom on ships to Boston and New Bedford.
People who had escaped slavery and were now living in the North formed secret networks to aid those in flight. In Cairo, Illinois, George Burroughes, a Black porter on the Illinois Central railroad to Chicago, aided all he could. William Wells Brown ran a Lake Erie steamboat that carried men and women seeking freedom from Detroit or Buffalo. He wrote: “In the year 1842, I conveyed from the first of May to the first of December, 69 fugitives over Lake Erie to Canada.”
John H. Hooper, a Maryland man who had escaped enslavement, ran the underground railroad station in Troy, New York. Frederick Douglass ran one in Rochester, New York. Louis Washington, who had escaped slavery in Richmond, ran a station in Columbus, Ohio.
From Canada, white reformer Samuel Gridley Howe reported that, in the ten years before the Civil War, five hundred formerly enslaved people, “not content with personal freedom and happiness, went secretly back to their old homes, and brought away their wives and children at much peril and cost.” Harriet Beecher Stowe modeled her gentle “Uncle Tom” after Josiah Henson, but the real Henson was a daring man who brought out 118 people from bondage.
William Still, head of the Philadelphia station and author of The Underground Railroad.
Those who reached the North were often pursued by posses who seized and returned them. The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act imposed a $500 fine on any person who harbored or aided an enslaved person who had escaped. But in the first fugitive case in Boston, the prisoner bolted for freedom. While in court, the captured man knocked down two policemen and raced through the crowd.
In New York City, in 1801, 1826, and 1828, African Americans rioted against “blackbirds” or “slave catchers” from the South coming to capture people who had run from enslavement. By the late 1830s, a Committee of Vigilance battled “blackbirds” in the streets and courtrooms.
African American communities in the North and their white friends increasingly defied the law to provide armed assistance to enslaved people seeking freedom. Boston minister Theodore Parker announced, “The first business of the antislavery men is to help the fugitives; we, like Christ, are to seek and save that which is lost.”
Perhaps the most determined flight from bondage was by a man who could not run. “General” was a tailor who fled the Virginia of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. In November 1784, his enslaver, Landon Carter, wrote a reward notice that described “General” as “very remarkable as a runaway having lost both his legs, cut off near the knees.”
The bravest figure in the effort to rescue enslaved people was probably Harriet Tubman. At fifteen, as she helped a man trying to escape, her head caught the force of a two-pound weight thrown by an overseer. From then on, dizzy spells and sleeping seizures came on her without warning. She married John Tubman, but when he refused to join her escape from eastern Maryland in 1848, she left with her two brothers. When they lost heart and returned, she reached freedom alone.
Tubman found a calling to help others and for the next ten years returned nineteen times to Atlantic seaboard states with legalized slavery. She aided three hundred men, women, and children—loved ones and perfect strangers—to escape. She carried a pistol for enemies and the faint of heart, and potions to quiet crying infants. She proudly claimed, “I never lost a single passenger.”
A reward of $40,000 was offered for her dead or alive, but she never stopped. She stated her simple creed: “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted.”
Those who left the South were fleeing slavery, but they were running to a future as well. Henry Bibb became a noted antislavery lecturer. He campaigned for the Liberty Party in the US and later settled in Canada, where he published that country’s first Black newspaper.
Lewis and Milton Clarke became abolitionist lecturers and authors, as did Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft.
The Parker brothers, who had their resistance training during their flight, armed and trained dozens of young African Americans in Pennsylvania. In 1851, the Parkers’ volunteer army fired the first shots of the war against slavery (see Chapter 10).
During the Civil War, Octave Johnson left his maroon friends in Louisiana to become a corporal in a US Army regiment. During the war Susie King served as a nurse and teacher for Black soldiers. Harriet Tubman served as a US Army scout behind Confederate lines in the Carolinas. She spent the rest of her life (she died in 1913) not living quietly, but running a retirement home for elderly formerly enslaved people.
Henry Bibb relied on deception, as did most enslaved people, to fool their enslavers.