Kidnapped into Slavery Lecture: Richard Bell

good evening everyone my name is Audrey Davis and I am the director for the division of African-American history for the office of historic Alexandria I also serve as the vice president for the Alexandria historical society and tonight's lecture is co-sponsored both by the office of historic Alexandria and the Alexandria historical societ we are so pleased to welcome our guest speaker tonight Dr Richard Bells professor of history at the University of Maryland and the author of the book stolen five free boys kidnapped into slavery and their astonishing Odyssey home this book was a finalist for the George Washington Prides and the Harriet Tubman Prides he has held major research fellowships at Yale Cambridge and the Library of Congress and he is the recipient of the National Endowment of the humanities public scholar award and the 2020 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship Dr Bell serves as a trustee of the Maryland Center for history and culture as well as a fellow for of the royal Historical Society after tonight's lecture Dr Ben scolnick from the office of historic Alexandria will moderate our Q&A and we ask that if you have questions that you place them in the Q&A tonight we look forward to the lecture from Dr Bell and I will now turn over the virtual Podium to him thank you thank you Audrey thanks so much for that introduction and for all the work you do to shine a spotlight on African-American history in our region uh thanks to uh Jim working behind the scenes to make the tech run smoothly today uh and Ben thanks to you as well for the important work you and the whole team are doing at Freedom House in historic Alexandria folks have not been to Freedom House uh since the grand uh reopening I hope many people will take this opport to put it on their calendars you will find its history is directly connected to some of the themes I'm going to talk about uh today so I'm Rick Bal at Rick Bell I teach at the University of Maryland uh up in College Park uh I'm originally British but don't let my U British accent uh confuse you I deal with American uh history and I'm going to talk today about some of the themes in this recent book and set it in some broader historical context and I encourage you as you heard from Audrey to put any comments or questions you have have in the Q and A tab uh so that Ben can go poking around in there um and throw some of those comments and questions in my direction when uh my prepared remarks are over in about 35 minutes time uh so let me go ahead and share my slides Cornelius Sinclair was 10 years old but he was trapped he was stuck he was locked in the belly of a small ship that probably looked a lot like this one on the screen a small ship that was bobbing in the middle of the Delaware River a mile south of Philadelphia a man had grabbed this 10-year-old kid from a spot near Philadelphia's Market an hour ago shoved a gag into his mouth tossed him into a wagon and hold him here it was dark below the ship's waterline but Cornelius could see enough to know that he was not the only child locked down here four pairs of eyes stared back at him four other African-American boys one of them looked about his size he was probably 10 or 11 like Cornelius two more were taller perhaps 14 or 15 the last of them were shorter and smaller than everyone else he might have been as young as eight yesterday all five boys had been free like you and me but today they were ins slaved prisoners of a gang of child snatchers who plan to sell their lives and labor most likely to plantation owners in the Deep South if their abductor has got away with this 10-year-old Cornelius would spend the rest of his life as someone else's property somewhere very far away he'd probably never see his family again Cornelius disappeared in late August of 1825 he was one of dozens of African-American children to vanish in very similar circumstances from Philadelphia that single year alone in the early 1800s the city was the Hub of American slavery's blackest Market Philadelphia's grided streets and Tangled alleys were hunting grounds for Crews of professional kidnappers who made their livings turning free black kids like Cornelius into Southern slaves they did their work swiftly and shamelessly in Brazen a front to Philadelphia's reputation at the time not only as the City of Brotherly Love But as a safe haven for people of color and as the headquarters of the American anti-slavery movement but to criminals to kidnappers of course none of that mattered in truth early 19th century Philly was probably one of the most dangerous places to be free and black anywhere in the United States this was a product of Philadelphia's location it was the nearest major free City on the the east coast to the slave South Philadelphia lay just 40 m north of the Mason Dixon line the boundary that separated Pennsylvania from several slave states to its South including Maryland where I live as Pennsylvania and other northern states had slowly disentangled themselves from race slavery in the 50 or so years after the American Revolution that boundary had become ever more important especially for black people by 1825 the year that Cornelius was kidnapped the Mason Dixon line seemed to divide two worlds separating Northern free States from the southern slave states Philadelphia's proximity to that Frontier line made its many free black residents attractive targets for professional people snatchers pushing in from nearby slave states and they would pre on the members of the city's free black community relentlessly putting bulls eyes on their backs prices on their heads the people they stole away from Liberty could fetch anywhere up to $155,000 per person in today's money in Louisiana Mississippi and Alabama three of the new Terror territories and States rising up along the Gulf Coast at this time the American settlers swarming into that region demanded a nearly bottomless supply of forced labor to cut their sugar cane and pick their cotton and they would take almost anyone to do that unpaid work buying a small percentage of their forced laborers from kidnappers of free black Americans might not have been their first choice but their options were limited Planters in the Deep South had been forced to look to American sources for their Manpower needs ever since 1808 that was the year that lawmakers in Washington had passed legislation outling any further Imports of black people from Africa or the cariban for the purposes of enslaving them here in the United States that 8 1908 decision is not hugely well known unless you're an historian like B and Audrey and me but this 1808 decision was a major turning point in the history of slavery in America because it would spur the growth of an American internal domestic slave trade within the United States after that 1808 decision closing off the legal foreign Supply Interstate slave Traders here in the US tried to satisfy these Southwestern settlers demands for black labor by bringing them thousands of American Born enslaved people each year from existing slave states like Virginia and Maryland that were in Surplus and where Planters were willing to sell a proportion of their laborers to slave traders that by the way was all legal it was big business and it's the story told in Freedom House which used to be owned by a slave trading firm called Franklin and Armfield but settlers down in the Deep South wanted even more than that and the stronger their demand the more tempting and more profitable it became for anyone sufficiently coldblooded to try to kidnap three children like Cornelius from Northern American cities like Philadelphia smuggle them into the legal supply chain I just described and then sell them in this vast new Southwestern slave market those economic incentives left Philadelphia's large and dynamic free black community dangerously exposed by 1825 the City of Brotherly Love to become the center of a nationwide kidnapping operation to become the largest northern Depot of something I call America's reverse Underground Railroad so when you hear me use that phrase tonight America's reverse Underground Railroad I'm referring to what I just described the kidnapping of free black Americans usually from northern towns and cities for the purpose of selling them as slaves in the southwest this verse Underground Railroad and its much better known namesake the Underground Railroad ran in opposite directions and existed for completely different purposes but because they're opposites of one another they're also mirror images of one another on the Underground Railroad the good one the famous One the Harriet Tubman one on the Underground Railroad enslaved people abandoned Southern plantations and tracked usually northward dreaming of new lives and new opportunities in Freedom on America's reverse Underground Railroad free black people were stolen from freedom in Northern cities like Philly and were made to trudge Southward to be sold into Plantation slavery on the Underground ra Road conductors like Harriet tobman risk their lives and their own liberty to help black fugitives make these epic journeys of Freedom while on America's reverse Underground Railroad the conductors were kidnappers human traffickers motivated simply by money both of these networks one heroic and courageous the other evil and monstrous both networks roared to life in the early 1800s to exploit what by then had become major differences in the legal status of slavery in the North and the South both networks were Loosely organized and opportunistic both ran on secrecy and relied on small Circles of trusted participants Forge documents false identities and disguise the direction of travel was usually very different The Roots taken by freedom Seekers going north and victims of kidnapping made to go south The Roots were largely the same and they might even have pass one another on the roads from time to time and what's more the volume of traffic on these two metaphorical railroads was roughly the same size each year each one carried hundreds of black adults and children across state lines half towards liberty half towards slavery I think most Americans know quite a lot about the Underground Railroad by now historians have after all spent decades studying the strategies and tactics that Harriet Tubman and her fellow conductors and station agents use to help freedom Seekers Escape From Slavery their achievements Now command our attention and there are Underground Railroad walking tours television shows museums and in a recent movie all of them dedicated to celebrating the men and women who created the secret Network through which the enslaved could escape to Freedom yet we know far less about America's reverse Underground Railroad its conductors its station agents worked tirelessly to remain Untouchable and the identities of all but handful of those criminals still remain a secret even today they certainly never gave public lectures about their work or went on fundraising tours only rarely do their names and crimes even appear in police files or trial transcripts that low profile in surviving legal sources the result of the years they spent in the shadows protected by bribes protected by corruption protected by too much indifference and apathy among ordinary white Americans who knew what they were up to and did nothing to stop it the Outlaws who built America's reverse Underground Railroad left no business records no bundles of private letters for historians to read and examine in the Library of Congress the kidnappers didn't write Memoirs they didn't pose for paintings or photographs leaving journalists and activists of that era simply to guess as you see here as to what they might have looked like no one posed but this image yet as I argue in my book stolen these professional kidnappers left their mark everywhere on 19th century America if we think not just about Philadelphia where the true story I tell in stolen begins but about every town and city with a free black population and that would include Alexandria if we think not just about 1825 when this True Story begins but about each and every year between I don't know 1808 in the Civil War we can say with depressing certainty that all told the kidnappers who built America's reverse Underground Railroad stole away from Liberty likely tens of thousands of free black people many of them children like Cornelius who were under the age of 16 and let me be Crystal Clear most of those they kidnapped were never heard from again their families and friends would search frantically for them they would Lobby they would petition they might even advertise they would wait in Earnest for news but usually nothing and no one came back free black people in Northern cities like Philadelphia had few white allies in this period of American History beyond the meager ranks of a handful of Quaker Le anti-slavery societies what's more white employers openly discriminate against African-American job applicants and City constables generally ignored people of color's complaints turned a blind eye to most white on black street violence so when kids like Cornelius went missing their parents could hardly ever persuade Mayors magistrates and policeman to get involved to do something it was rarer still for anyone to be able to gather enough evidence to issue arrest warrants or search property or interrogate suspects and even then experienced members of these many different kidnapping Crews knew exactly what to do exactly what to say to talk their way out of trouble get right back to work it looks like we have 47 households logged in right now I'm guessing all of you have heard of 12 Years a Slave as you all remember 12 years the slave was the name of a movie based on a memoir written by a guy named Solomon norup he was one of the tens of thousands of victims of America's reverse Underground Railroad however unlike almost everyone else northop later escaped Southern slavery though it took him 12 years and then he returned home and then he wrote about it all and in that Memoir 12 Years a Slave written in 1853 northop explains what riding America's reverse Underground Railroad was like for him he explains how a pair of well-dressed white con men lured him into New York City from his home Upstate in 1841 at the time by the way northop was a well educated and prosperous musician in his mid-30s in Manhattan they whined and dined him and if you remember the movie you remember they drugged him too and then they sold him to an interstate slave trader right in our area Washington DC northop was soon forced onto a slave ship Bound for New Orleans and there he was sold in one of that City's Infamous slave showrooms to a planter who' then put him to work in his Cane Fields 10 years ago in 2013 that Oscar winning film based on North's extraordinary autobiography Drew overdue attention to his ordeal but both the Memoir and the movie author I think distorted and perhaps misleading views of the people whom the Agents of America's reverse Underground Railroad usually targeted and how those kidnappers usually made their money you see it turns out that northop's experience on America's reverse Underground Railroad was not at all typical of everyone else's the kidnappers rarely approached highly literate middle-aged men like Northup no no no those kidnappers preferred instead to lure away poorly educated Street kids with tricks that could swiftly separate them from their families very few of the kidnappers captives traveled by ship to New Orleans either instead kidnappers forced most boys and girls to track Southward on foot in small specialized Overland convoys known as coffel their prisoners rarely ended up in showrooms or on The Auction Block they were vastly more likely to be sold off in ones and twos along the way in ferp all cash deals to hard up Planters in the interior of Mississippi or the interior of Alabama to be sold to men who wanted to buy more slaves but who were too cheap to pay big city New Orleans slave prices all of that was what was typical and all of that is almost exactly what happened to Cornelius Sinclair one of the five central figures in my recent book in August of 1825 Cornelius and Sam and Enos Alex and Joe fell into the hands of 19th century America's most fearsome gang of kidnappers their captors hustled them onto that little ship I mentioned just outside Philadelphia which of course is in the top right hand of corner of this map their captors warehoused them for a while in a pair of safe houses down on the Delaware Maryland line just about the word nanot at the bottom of your screen and then they marched the five of them halfway across this vast continent toward the Deep South where they would try to sell all five three children as slaves this was a soul destroying Journey if you were a child it is a journey of 2 million footsteps I have a lot to say about this journey in the book but in the interests of time tonight I'm going to pass over we're got a live mic somewhere uh in the interests of uh time I'm going to pass over that journey and likewise my publisher requires that I pass over much of the books second half the second half in which we learn that some though not all of these five boys will make a miraculous escape and begin the astonishing Odyssey home to Philadelphia referred to in the book's subtitle all I can really say here is that what Cornelius and Sam and Enos and Alex and Joe made happen next was indeed astonishing to unto me it would involve two murders three exhumations of dead bodies an escape a recapture a suicide a race riot a lawsuit the nation's first most wanted list and America's largest Manhunt so far so instead of breaking my contract to my publisher and telling you everything that happens in this book that we both want you to read let me just quickly note that the full story of what did happen next has never before been told and for understandable reasons remember Cornelius was a child at the time he came from a hard up family that was not the sort to leave behind many traces in libraries and archives of course this is a problem because this is a true story it's history and historians need sources lots of them to reconstruct past lives in ways that are fair and true the stories and struggles of the many Americans who do not leave behind Rich troves of papers Diaries or Memoirs often remain Untold and unstudied as a result so to reconstruct Cornelius to reconstruct cornelius's Journey along America's reverse Underground Railroad I began by ringing whatever I could from a small packet of letters written to or from the mayor of Philadelphia a man who weighs belatedly into this story and ringing what I could from coverage of cornelius's case in a single anti-slavery magazine that took an interest at the time to be clear historians have known about these modest sources for a while but on their own they turn out to be too few too thin to sustain a whole book length reconstruction of this astonishing Odyssey into and out of slavery so I had to keep going had to go looking elsewhere had to dig around in almost literally any archive I could find for scraps of information that when put together could help fles this all out along the way there've been a lot of days spent finding nothing at all looking for needles in hay stacks finding only hay But ultimately I think it's been worth it over six years of research for this book I Unearthed dozens and dozens of needles buried in those Hy Stacks new sources about this case buried within 35 archives in 14 states in the District of Columbia among those things I found was the handwritten notes of a trial that took place down in Tuscaloosa Alabama a trial which would decide the fate of one of these boys the fate of Cornelius actually I also discovered a pair of letters in which one of his kidnappers names his accomplice and describes their roles in this particular kidnapping case an astonishing find that I even copied into the back of the book so you can read it for yourself and yet most affectingly of all was something I came across pretty early in the research it was a small missing person's notice put in a Philadelphia paper by cornelius's grieving father it's short so I'm going to read it to you says Boy Lost the subscriber's son Cornelius Sinclair a colored boy about 11 years old left his friends yesterday as he had no cause and had never before absented himself it's feared he's been seduced Away by some evil-minded person as son is a very dark skinned mixed race lad he's pretty stout built he's got thin long fingers but his eyes are weak and his left eye is smaller than his right any person hearing of our son will confer a favor on his afflicted parents by giving information to my employer at this address Joseph Sinclair as you can imagine I've read this ad literally hundreds of times in my life every single time I read it the same two words jump out at me like they're written in neon like they're written 60 foot high on the side of a building Afflicted parents all of us are children of parents many of us are parents of children or grandchildren I have a 10-year-old I can hear practicing her piano in the room below me I have an 8-year-old watching PBS Kids The thought that my children could be stolen away from me and there'd be nothing I could do to get them back that just tears at me rips at me in a really Primal basic human way afflicted parents to me that that's the understatement of the 19th century so before Ben and I seek your questions and now is definitely the time to put some in the Q&A tab before I seek your questions let me wrap up this short talk with a couple of Reflections about why I think learning about America's reverse Underground Railroad is important and why Cornelius Sinclair as particular experience as a rider on that railroad is worth your time to begin with I would argue forcefully that black lives have always mattered and so any true story about free children being ripped from their families and swallowed up by American slavery is worth reconstructing for its own damning sake but the remarkable ordeal that Cornelius and His Four fellow captives endure also demands our attention I think for many other reasons for one thing it serves as a pointed reminder that in the decades before the Civil War child snatching was heartbreakingly frequent in Northern towns and cities and that black freedom in America was achingly fragile it demonstrates too the important role that this grotesque trade in kidnpped free people played in accelerating the spread of American slavery into the deep south over the same period now as I said I'm not at Liberty to spill all the beans about the book's astonishing second half I'm not at Liberty to tell you exactly what happened to Cornelius after he was kidnapped and trafficked into Alabama I hope you'll read the book or find it in your library but in case you don't read it I will drop a few big hints right here and I will say here that the dogged efforts of all those involved in trying to save Cornelius and these four other boys from the horrors of slavery in the southwest would have profound consequences the rescue efforts of parents and allies the aftermath of their campaign would radic radicalize black communities across the free states inspiring African-Americans to embrace bold new tactics in the cause of their own self-defense and mutual protection their efforts to help themselves would reshape the rest of the American anti-slavery movement as well they would encourage white abolitionists like the two white women who wrote this children's anti-slavery alphabet to try to focus the northern reading Public's attention on the suffering of black families forcibly separated by kidnappers by slave catchers slave Traders and by slavery itself most immediately outrage over the Abduction of these five boys would force lawmakers in Pennsylvania to pass a tough new anti- kidnapping measure known as a personal Liberty law this 1826 Pennsylvania personal Liberty law would enrage Southerners and slaveholders and kidnappers more so than any other state law passed before the Civil War and set in motion a chain of Court challenges to it and political retaliations against it that culminated in The Passage through Congress of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 a pro slavery Pro kidnapping Abomination put this country on a collision course with Civil War to conclude then Cornelius Sinclair's experience as a rider on America's reverse underground rail road was the result of the meeting of massive economic and political forces and what happened to him and the things that he and the other boys made happen next word as I've just suggested Usher in a new chapter in the history of slavery and freedom in the United States but that lasting Legacy must never be allowed to obscure the Urgent Stakes of his particular story a 10-year-old boy that four other free children were dragged into slavery they would have to fight like hell to try to escape and folks that's where I'm going to pause in a minute we're going to turn with Ben's help to your comments and questions do uh pop something in the Q&A if you'd like me to try my best to respond um this book has been out for a couple of years you can find it in your local libraries and you should support your local libraries if you'd like to own a copy it's very easy to do so and if you'd like to own a sign copy just send me an email at the address at the bottom left of your screen RJ Bell umd.edu and I'll be all too happy to sell you one and mail you uh one Ben can I throw things back to you sure um so as a as a historian history person I like to hear about how other historians get into and find the stories that they tell and then what that point of entry into the story is and what's the hook that got your attention to turn this into a full length book so you you said I think in Philadelphia the the library company of Philadelphia You Found Records what part of the story did you first read about and and how did you know that this was going to become a book it's a great question um Ben yeah I came came into this story that became this book stolen backwards and I'm going to take down my screen by the way um I came into this story backwards and at the end uh I was working on my previous book which was um a pretty nerdy book about suicide in early America you can tell I'm drawn to dark and difficult topics and I've been working on that for a long time and as I was wrapping up uh a friend of mine who knew that I was writing a book about suicide in early America sent me a clipping from an 1829 Delaware newspaper and that newspaper told its readers that um there had been a likely suicide in a jail down in Georgetown Delaware a little town down on the peninsula uh in which a uh elderly white woman um had uh taken her own life as she was waiting trial um on murder charges for having allegedly murdered some slave Traders and some black people that woman's name was Patty Cannon a name Ben probably recognizes but which meant nothing to me when I first came across that alleged suicide um as I began digging into the circumstances of Patty kennan's death and whether or not she committed suicide I ultimately concluded she didn't um I became aware of who she was when she was alive and who she was when she was alive was the co-leader of the most active and fearsome and Infamous Gang of kidnappers of fre black people anywhere in the United States in the 1820s a woman so notorious for her crimes against black Freedom that Frederick Douglas knew who she was we think Harriet tobman had heard the name Patty Cannon she was famous enough that president at the time John Quincy Adams had probably heard that name she was a bogey man a bogey woman um I had never heard of her back in whatever year this was let's say 2011 or something like that and I could not believe that one could have a career kidnapping fre black Americans um for as long as she did without consequences without the law catching up to her much faster than it actually did so I began exploring this phenomenon of the kidnapping of three black uh people and became aware of just how nightmarishly frequent it was um for free black communities across our region uh Ben I focused my comments and my book on Philadelphia but a similar book could be written about Baltimore City for instance and Alexandria and Georg Town anywhere else with a free black community I didn't know any of this when I began this project and so I wrote this book to uh educate myself about this grotesque phenomenon and then share my findings with as many people as possible and I will say that the book has changed a lot since I first conceived it um it began as a biography of this awful woman Patty uh Cannon the uh co-leader of the gang responsible for dozens maybe more dozens and dozens of kidnappings of free black folk but I found it very very difficult to get up every morning and be excited to get into Patty Canon's brain uh and to see the world from her uh jaist point of view so over time the project shifted from being a biography of her and her business to being a biography of five of the boys to whom she tried to do this um given that on this particular occasion um some of the boys had been able to fre themselves uh that if you squint in this particular case Ben there's a happy ending for the victims of uh child kidnapping now for most victims of child kidnapping there was no happy ending but what these boys did in the second half of this true story uh provided a an interesting uh Counterpoint and a story of you know resistance and resilience against enormous odds I was drawn to that those boys I was drawn to their courage uh and their decisiveness um and so I tried to tell the story about this awful phenomenon through the actions of some very brave boys who tried to resist it um a second ago you said something about getting inside the head of Patty Canon um we've had conversations with Josh Rothman who's written a book about Fright arfield um when we've had him up to talk to him he has said something very similar about how he's had to spend years of his life inside the heads of Isaac Franklin and jarfield and rice and somebody in the chat um Mark I think asked how do you how do you handle being uh inside of these people's heads that's a great question yeah uh folks for folks who didn't catch the reference in Ben's question then Ben is referring in part to uh the historian Joshua Rothman who teaches at University of Alabama who wrote an important and remarkable book called The Ledger and the chain The Ledger in the chain and it is a biography of a business and the business is a business called Franklin and Armfield and it is a legal uh Enterprise not a criminal Enterprise like I'm describing here it's a legal Enterprise uh which specializes in buying enslaved people from uh enslavers in our region carrying them across the country and selling them to new buyers in the Deep South that's called the domestic slave trade it's entirely legal and Josh wrote this excellent and important study of this one firm which left much more complete business records behind it than many other firms that did this same work um I think two other things the first is that you know as historians we will believe it or not never attain objectivity objectivity is impossible uh anyone who says it is doesn't know what they're talking about we all have biases and we can never just set those aside completely they will always be with us whether we recognize them or not so I go into a story about Patty Cannon or Franklin and Armfield knowing that I disagree with them knowing that I find what they did racist and evil and abhorent uh and I'm quite willing to say that on the page so there's no mistaking my own positionality in relationship to them I think think we as people as citizens should call out evil and racism when we see it no matter what century it's in however at the same time my professional responsibilities are to try to reconstruct the values and decisions of people very different to me who've been dead a long time so that readers can try to understand why these people did the evil things they did I think we can reconstruct the motives of a uh an Isaac Franklin or a John Armfield or a Patty Cannon uh without apologizing for them and that's really what I'm trying to do in a book like uh this but then the other thing I'll say Ben of course is that um uh I think Josh Rothman would have maybe loved to tell the story of Franklin at Armfield solely through the experiences of African-Americans who were wronged by this evil company but the surviving records make that very hard to do likewise it's not easy to tell the story of uh kidnappers through surviving records about those they kidnapped usually those records are very thin very few and of course they often come from the pen or the point of view of the Trader or the kidnapper right the oppressor in these stories making it very hard to read against the grain and put a black voice and a black person and a black perspective at the center of a narrative but um stolen certainly attempts that um effort because it relies on some records generated by the boys themselves two of the boys and I'm not giving too much away here I hope uh two of the boys um are able to give testimony to law enforcement about their ordeal and that testimony gets written down and that because it's law enforcement those legal sources survive today in places like the library company uh Philadelphia so in this unu highly unusual case I have the voices of two of these boys telling me in their own words what happened to them and what they thought about it and that's a very unusual POS position for a historian of this uh these um phenomenon to uh have so I seize that opportunity and tried to put the boys at the center um but you know readers will still notice there are places where I have to make surmises about what they were thinking and feeling at different points in the journey because their own surviving documents do not tell me this question is uh we think of Philadelphia as a Quaker City friendly to free blacks did qu have a role in the story and I should add that like Philadelphia Alexandria too has sizeable Quaker population in Alli Century that's lovely yeah I'm a big fan of Philadelphia it's a city I would uh love to live in long term I did more research in Philadelphia for this book than in any other uh place outside of Mississippi um so I've got a lot of uh love and respect for the City of Brotherly Love um but it's also true that Philadelphia was not literally a City of Brotherly Love that's just its name uh like New York is not literally a giant Apple uh it's just a name uh and the City of Philadelphia in the 1820s despite a Quaker Foundation uh founded by William pen Quakers famously committed to pacifism um humanitarianism and arguably religious toleration does not mean that the city that uh existed in 1825 always lived up to those high standards in fact Quakers numerically were a tiny minority in Philly by the 18 uh 20s they did not necessarily control all the levers of power they did not run every neighborhood uh and um the law enforcement was a much broader um uh Department than just uh Quakers so what that means in practice is that even though northern states like Pennsylvania had moved to abolish slavery by the early 1800s no Northern State had eradicated racism that racism against people of African descent were attitudes of white supremacy were widespread uh both in southern slave states as you might expect but also in Northern free states like um Pennsylvania so um by the 1820s you can find Quakers doing excellent things to try to help some uh black people mitigate the worst effects of anti-black racism I think of Quaker School teachers uh for instance the Quaker um leaders of some of the anti-slavery organizations in this period um but they do not have uh complete power and they are arguably massively outnumbered by non-quaker white folks who do not see the problem with kidnappers coming to their city and kidnapping away black children and adults to sell them into slavery in Mississippi and we know that because we can find editorials from uh folks in Delaware and Pennsylvania and Maryland writing into the newspaper about all the kidnappings in their community and saying if we could find all these kidnappers we should give them a pat on the back and a 5-year tax break for the great service they're doing ridding our communities of this black underclass who no one wants here these are what white folks are saying to each other in public so imagine what they're saying to each other in private we have two questions here um that are very similar um so you draw this line in between these kidnappings and kidnappings like it to uh the Pennsylvania personal Liberty laws to try to prevent these kidnappings to uh eventually to the fug Slave Act and into the Civil War uh and so can you speak about your perspective of why the pro slave reaction was so strong and successful in Congress oh sure yes thanks for that question yeah so the how we get from uh this kidnapping case in 1825 to an anti-kidnapping law in 1826 to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that is a complicated story which I share towards the end of the book and I'm not going to try and recap it here here so I'll just go to the question Ben actually asked me which is that is how could such a proslavery pro kidnapping abomination of a law like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 how could it get through Congress in 1850 there's a few things to remember here but they all boil down arguably um to the 3- fifths Clause of the original Constitution uh in 1787 the original Constitution contains a clause called the 3- fifths Clause um which uh we all know was terrible but we often misunderstand what was terrible about it um if you ask the man in the street what was terrible about the three- fifths Clause of the Constitution that that person would generally say Well it treated black people as only three fifths of a person or something like that and that's actually not what's terrible about the 3- fifths Clause the 3- fifths clause was designed to affect the calculations to determine how many Congressman each state would get in Congress and it says that to figure out how many Congressman a state is going to get you should count the number of people in that state and then divide by 30,000 to get the number of congressmen okay fair enough but what counts as a person well the three Clause says that a person is either a free person or 3 fifths of an enslaved person and so if you want to count the official population of somewhere like Maryland you count all the free people men and women boys and girls and you count three fifths of the numbers of enslaved people and add that to the free population then divide by 30,000 to get the number of congressmen I know this is more math than anyone expected at 8:00 on a Wednesday night but what that means is that states with large enslaved populations like Maryland like Virginia are going to wind up with more congressmen than states with similarly sized free populations but no enslaved population whatsoever states that have abolished slavery are at a disadvantage because of the 3- fifths clause and so what that means net is that northern states where slave has been slowly abolished end up with significantly fewer congressmen in Washington than states which haven't abolished slavery and have large numbers of enslaved people to count even if it's only at three- fifths of their actual numbers so what that means and I'm coming to the point I swear is that the House of Representatives is stacked with pro-slavery votes Southerners who support slavery and it's not just the house because the three- fifths clause also influenced is who the president is because we have the Electoral College we don't have direct election of a president in this country we rely on the Electoral College and the number of electors in that college that each state gets to send to determine the president every four years is calculated by adding the number of senators from each state to the number of congressmen from each state so what that means is on net every four years southern states will have more electoral C votes than northern states because they're factoring congressmen into that calculation that means that um the president is more likely to be a southerner or a slaveholder than not it doesn't make it impossible to elect an anti-slavery candidate look at Abraham Lincoln or John Quincy Adams but in general it's much easier and more likely that a southern enslaver will be elected and if you look at the early history of the presidency that's exactly what happens so if and also by the way uh it's the president that appoints the um uh Supreme Court so the Supreme Court's going to be stacked with these guys as well so excluding the Senate it means that pro-slavery forces have a structural Advantage when it comes to defending slavery and passing laws that protect the slave power and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 is the perfect example of that we have time for one more question and so I'm going to squeeze two questions through this one question um and it is they're joined me about um what you call in your book The merse Underground Railroad uh and so the first is um about the origin of the term did you coin it and if not where did you borrow it from what are some read we can do uh and the second half of the question is about um it's kind of a question that we get asked at Freedom mous frequently and people want to know the routes that Franklin arfield and George Kart and and the legal slave traders in Alexandria that they took Overland nchads and so if you could speak for just a minute about I don't know that the answer we I think we generally give is that there's not a single line on a map you can draw but if you can kind of talk abstractly about what makes good route on the reverse underground rle I I'll be as brief as I can which is not very uh I'll say firstly I did not coin the term reverse Underground railroad it was a term that I became aware of as I did research for this book uh I can think of at least one historian who used it in print before I did and it existed online among folklorists and amateur historians before I got to it so I am trying I hope to popularize the term that I think is more useful than not in drawing attention to the scale of kidnapping of black Americans if the term reverse underground real Road makes you think hold on what is that it sounds important then that ter is doing its work and it's catchy enough memorable enough annoying enough um that it is of Greater service than the much more nuanced uh name like the kidnapping and traffic into in trafficking into slavery of free black Americans right that is not catchy so uh it's not my term but I'm happy to popularize it uh The Roots is fascinating yeah so as you point out Ben um slave Traders like Franklin and Armfield uh used multiple passages to their markets in the Deep South um some used oceangoing ships going from places like Alexandria around Florida and uh to Ports like New Orleans others used river boats to you know connect the Ohio River to the Mississippi Etc uh and others forced people to walk occasionally in wagons or on horses but usually walking um slave Traders I think used almost every route uh that made economic sense so if there were places to stop if it was a direct route if there were potential buyers along the way all those factors made for a good route um and you can trace the roots of the domestic slave trade just by looking at infrastructure maps of the United States where the roads were where the canals the turnpikes the rivers um uh were everywhere an oceangoing vessel went was a potential route but kidnapp peers uh they surprisingly hued to largely the same Roots they did not carve out separate hidden clandestine routings they actually wanted to walk on the same paths that Franklin and armfield's coffels might have walked down and that's because kidnappers of free black people are hiding in plain site they are disguising themselves as the legal traffickers of legally purchased property cuz from a distance a sadl looking chained up Convoy of black people walking 15 mil a day to the South does not on its face appear to be illegal it appears to be a manifestation of the much broader and wholly legal domestic slave trade pioneered by Franklin at Armfield so kidnappers like the Cannons and the Johnson's uh would try to emulate those practices and try to be mistaken um for legal slave Traders wherever they could thank you very much um Audrey can I turn it back to you yes of course thank you thanks Ben thank you Dr B we appreciate your time and spending the evening with us and those who have not gotten a copy of stolen I encourage you to do so so you can learn more about this amazing story and as we come to the end of Black History Month tomorrow tomorrow with our leap day I would remind people that at the black history museum at 7.m tomorrow we will have more of our meaningful conversations and this is an Interfaith uh perspective on refugees and immigration so we hope that you will join us the this Series has been amazing again I want to extend my thanks to Dr Richard Bell for spending the evening with us we hope that he will come back again and share future works with us as well and I extend everyone a very good evening thank you good night

Channel: HistoricAlexandriaVA

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Id: GOsU7vhE6yc

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024