Stealing children into the slave trade: When the Underground Railroad moved south
You think you know the story of the Reverse Underground Railroad. You know it from Solomon Northrup’s memoir, 12 Years a Slave, and the 2013 movie it inspired.
Think again.
Northrup’s movie story is true enough, allowing for Hollywood’s embellishments, of one man’s experience. But a new book by Richard Bell, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, describes the much more typical experience of free Blacks who were kidnapped from their homes in northern states and sold south into slavery in the years just before the Civil War.
A ban on a slave trade backfires
As Bell describes in Stolen, Cornelius Sinclair disappeared in late August 1825. He moved not in the comfortable artistic society enjoyed by Solomon Northrup, but the gritty streets of Philadelphia. Cornelius could read and write, but in that regard stood out among his peers.
More chilling, though, is that Cornelius was a child.
“He was, believe it or not, one of dozens of African-American children to banish in very similar circumstances from Philadelphia that single year alone,” Bell told a recent Profs and Pints audience in Washington, D.C.
Cornelius was 10 when he was lured to a back alley near Philadelphia’s waterfront with the promise of making a few cents hauling peaches. Gagged and tossed into the back of a wagon, Cornelius soon found himself with four other boys on the Little John on Philadelphia’s Delaware River. He was brutally marched across the upper South and ultimately sold into a life of slavery in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Cornelius’ was one of hundreds of such kidnappings every year, and they did not arise by chance. Rather, they were a direct and peverse result of complicated provisions in both new country’s Constitution and federal law. The Constitution permitted a ban of trans-Atlantic slave trade, a provision popular among abolitionists and seen at the time as the first step on the inexorable path to the eradication of slavery. Thomas Jefferson signed a federal law that took advantage of that option the moment it became available, January 1, 1808.
The most dangerous place to be free and black?
Deprived of the slave trade, the plantation economy turned to kidnapping free Blacks in the north, particularly along the Mason-Dixon line. Philadelphia was the epicenter of the traffic in stolen human lives.
“It’s a brazen affront to Philadelphia's reputation at the time, not only as the City of Brotherly Love, but also as a safe haven for people of color,” Bell explains.
“But of course, to criminals, to kidnappers, none of that stuff matters. And in truth, in the early-nineteenth century, Philly was probably one of the most dangerous places to be free and black anywhere in the United States.”
Immediately after the kidnapping, Cornelius’ community stood on alert and his parents were shattered. Cornelius’ father, Joseph, posted a newspaper advertisement and asked for tips about Cornelius to be delivered to a merchant house near where Joseph worked as a porter.
“Any person hearing of him, will confer a favour on his afflicted parents, by giving information…,” Joseph Sinclair pleaded.
On a collision course with war
Ultimately, Cornelius was rescued. A complicated series of trades and payoffs landed him back with his parents just shy of his twelfth birthday.
But the impact of kidnapping reverberated. Legislators in Pennsylvania responded to what Bell described as “outrage” over the abduction of the five boys with a series of touch anti-kidnapping measures. Southerners retaliated with the harsh and punitive Fugitive Slave Act, which describes as a “bonanza for slaveholders that put the country on a collision course with civil war.”
Richard Bell is the author of “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Journey Home.” He spoke at a Profs and Pints event at Washington D.C.’s Penn Social.