Most Americans are well aware of the Underground Railroad that helped escaped Southern slaves find freedom in the North, but few have heard of the Reverse Underground Railroad that delivered free Northern black Americans into slavery. That’s probably not just because we prefer uplifting stories over shocking and depressing ones. It’s also because the latter railroad, which transported about the same number of people as the former—hundreds each year—puts the lie to the notion of the North as a safe haven, making the nation’s original sin even harder to forgive.
Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home By Richard Bell Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, on sale October 15.
Stolen, a new book by Richard Bell, tells the remarkable and brutal story of this other railroad, focusing on one horrifying case for which significant documentation exists. It involves the abduction of five African American boys from their families in Philadelphia in 1825.
What happened to these youngsters was not an aberration. During the first half of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of free Northern black people, many of them children, were kidnapped into slavery in Southern states. Plantation owners in Southern states would pay $400 to $700 per newfound slave, then a tidy sum (comparable to $9,000 to $15,000 today).
Bell, who teaches early American history at the University of Maryland, notes that, unlike Harriet Tubman and others who pla
The most famous story involving the Reverse Underground Railroad is that of Solomon Northup, the subject of the 2013 Oscar-winning film Twelve Years a Slave. Bell notes that many details of Northup’s story are atypical, in that he was well-educated and middle-aged; most kidnappers “preferred instead to lure away poorly educated children” with various ruses. In fact, the abduction of black children from Northern cities was so common that parents and communities were on guard against it.
“At home each night before bed and again over breakfast the next morning,” Bell writes, “parents pestered their sons and daughters to stay in large groups, to read body language, to steer clear of certain streets, and to be wary of promises too good to be true.” But that was often not enough to withstand the unscrupulous con men who ran the railroad.
The five boys in Bell’s book, ages eight to fifteen, were each abducted from the streets of Philadelphia in August 1825 by a man named John Purnell. He lured them away with promises of work for pay, taking them to a small vessel in a harbor on the Delaware River—what Bell refers to as a “floating dungeon”—and later locking them in a windowless attic in a dwelling that served as a sort of safehouse for the Reverse Underground Railroad.
“[T]hey were now chained to a stout metal tie that had seen a lot of prior use,” Bell writes. “After a time they likely turned their frantic, exhausted attention to the iron locks that cuffed their calves. Clenching their teeth in agony, scraping skin and bone, and drawing blood, they must have tried repeatedly to force the shackles over their swollen ankles. It was no use. They were stuck.”
After about a week, the boys—Cornelius, Sam, Enos, Alex, and Joe—were put aboard a wagon along with two black women who had been similarly abducted, and began a long, grueling journey to the deep South. The five boys, two women, and a husband-and-wife human trafficking team of Ebenezer and Sally Johnson thus set off on a 1,000-mile-long trek, mostly on foot, that took four months.
In Alabama, Sam managed to escape, but was promptly recaptured and returned to Ebenezer, who inflicted a horrific beating. “Over and over again Johnson battered Sam with his metal paddle and his homemade lash, first raising welts, then blister upon blister on the boy’s upper body and the side of his head,” Bell says. “By the time Johnson’s arm fell to his side, Sam was screaming in agony, his back scarlet.”
stolen
Within three days of Cornelius Sinclair's disappearance in August 1825, his father took out this ad in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia’s most popular paper, seeking information. (Included in Stolen and reprinted here courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.)
But Sam was actually lucky compared to Joe, who in December of 1825 was so badly beaten by Ebenezer Johnson that he died. The beating, prompted by reasons that are lost to history, if there were ever any at all, involved flogging Joe with a cart whip and smashing his head against the wagon’s iron wheels. The beating ended when Joe lost consciousness; he died two hours later.
Joe’s death, Bell relates, was an accident, one that deprived Johnson and his cohorts of the income that his sale would have brought. Johnson just got a little carried away.
The kidnappers managed to sell Cornelius into slavery; the three other boys were offered to a Mississippi slave owner named John Hamilton. Whether it was due to Joe’s death or his own beating, Sam was emboldened to tell Hamilton that the group consisted of free black Americans wrongfully abducted from the North. Hamilton believed this account, and went to a local lawyer. The lawyer contacted the mayor of Philadelphia, who took an interest in their case.
That set in motion a protracted legal battle to rescue the four surviving boys from slavery on grounds that they were not really slaves. (Otherwise, their lack of liberty and mistreatment would have been completely legal.) The boys’ cause drew substantial support from officials in Southern states—not because they found slavery abhorrent but because they recognized that the South’s ability to track down slaves who had escaped to Northern states depended on their demonstrated willingness to help enforce laws against the abduction and transport of free black people.
“To pursue and prosecute the agents of the Reverse Underground Railroad and to liberate their victims was thus to join a broader public-relations strategy to promote the South as a place where individual liberty was respected and private property was protected,” Bell writes. Such efforts were meant to “ensure the survival and long-term success of a new slave society in the Deep South, and to defend the legal domestic slave trade from external interference.”
But even this self-serving and corrupt motivation does not change the fact that the boys were liberated in 1826 and, in a subsequent investigation, were able to tell their stories in detail, which enabled Bell to write his book. It’s important that he did—especially in this moment, when we have a President who has authorized the wholesale incarceration of migrant children in for-profit detention facilities, and a presidential campaign in which the idea of reparations is being seriously discussed for the first time.
Both involve the race-based oppression of human beings. And both help drive home the point that nothing is more important right now than refusing to forget.