For Harriet Jacobs, escaping slavery meant hiding for several years in a prison of her own devising. He encountered an old acquaintance on a riverboat, and was nearly spotted by a ship captain he had once worked for. The failed escape attempt inspired "Uncle Tom's Cabin.". The escape was a catastrophe for the slaves who dared make a run for it. According to the Web site of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, "During the 1800s, it is estimated that more than 100,000 enslaved people sought freedom through the Underground Railroad" [source: Freedom Center]. After that date, fugitive slaves headed north. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. [4], Individuals who aided fugitive slaves were charged and punished under this law. He eventually returned to the United States in 1875 and worked as a magician. In September 1838, 20-year-old slave Frederick Douglass fled his job as a Baltimore ship’s caulker and boarded a train bound for the North. Douglass would endure even more close calls as he made his way north by train and ferry. How Frederick Douglass Escaped Slavery. In 1850, aided by the publicity of the Pearl incident, Congress stopped allowing the import and sale of slaves into the District of Columbia. The rat-infested room was tiny—only nine feet long and seven feet wide, with a sloping ceiling that never reached higher than three feet—and Jacobs later wrote that it offered “no admission for either light or air.” Nevertheless, she would spend an astonishing seven years living in the coffin-like space, watching her children play in the yard through a small peephole and only leaving for brief periods of nighttime exercise. Jacobs finally made her escape to the North in 1842, after a friend helped her secure passage on a boat bound for Philadelphia. This new law also brought bounty hunters into the business of returning slaves to their masters; a former slave could be brought back into the South to be sold back into slavery, if he/she was without freedom papers. Between 1850 and 1860, she returned to the South numerous times to help parties of other slaves to freedom, guiding them through the lands she knew well. By this point, their presence was militarily unnecessary, with a sufficient quantity of Spanish troops being stationed at the San Marcos fort in St. Augustine. Then they turned on the nearby office of an abolitionist paper and threatened an openly abolitionist Congressman they accused of supporting the escape. Fugitive slaves early in U.S. were sought out just as they were through the Fugitive slave law years, but early efforts included only Wanted posters, flyers etc. This is the most colorful and best known of the ways that abolitionists aided slaves out of the South and into Northern states. “Good morning, sir!” Smalls shouted to the astonished captain. And that book helped shock America into abolishing slavery for good. Since she could not read or write, Ellen placed her arm in a sling to avoid signing tickets and papers, but her ruse was nearly found out when a Charleston steamer clerk refused to sell the pair their tickets without a signature. Daniel Drayton, captain of the Pearl. The couple later moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Douglass established himself as one of the nation’s leading abolitionists. As more and more people filled the boat—77 in all—hope surged through the assembled slaves and the boat’s white crew. The Crafts arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day and were sheltered by abolitionists before continuing on to Boston. The Pearl incident and Washington Riot became so well known that pressure to stop the slave trade in the nation’s capital mounted. In 1835, she fled her plantation and briefly hid in some friends’ houses. But ironically, their disastrous escape attempt helped end the slave trade in Washington, D.C. After several tense hours, he arrived in New York, where he hid in the home of an anti-slavery activist and rendezvoused with Murray. From there, she proceeded by train to New York and reunited with family members. One of the most notable runaway slaves of American history and conductors of the Underground Railroad is Harriet Tubman. Drayton and Sayres were tried, convicted of 77 counts of illegally transporting a slave and aiding a slave, and thrown into jail when they could not pay their fines. Luckily for the Crafts, the captain of their previous ship happened to pass by and agreed to sign for her. © 2020 A&E Television Networks, LLC. Drayton hired the Pearl  as the escape vessel, enlisting the ship’s white captain, Edward Sayres, and a single boatman to assist with the escape. The Pearl incident helped stop slavery in another way, too: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous abolitionist author, cited the failed escape as an inspiration for her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Captain Daniel Drayton, hated slavery, and during years of sailing up and down the Atlantic coast, the pleas he heard from enslaved people touched his heart. [5], Many states tried to nullify the new slave act or prevent capture of escaped slaves by setting up new laws to protect their rights. “I have brought you some of the old United States’ guns, sir!”. The Pearl was forced to drop anchor near Point Lookout, Maryland. Florida became a Spanish possession once again in 1783 at the Treaty of Paris, and it again became a destination for fugitive slaves. They dragged the ship, slaves and crew back to Washington. The young bondsman was disguised in a sailor’s uniform provided by his future wife, Anna Murray, and carried a free sailor’s protection pass loaned to him by an accomplice. Ten foot tall bronze sculpture of the Edmonson Sisters by sculptor Erik Blome on Duke Street in Alexandria VA. (Credit: Bronzecastman/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0). And though the stakes were high, the potential payoff was more than worth it. The United States Constitution, ratified in 1788, never uses the words "slave" or "slavery", but recognized its existence in the so-called fugitive slave clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3), the three-fifths clause, and the prohibition on prohibiting importation, for 20 years, of "such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit" (Article I, Section 9). One of the most notable is the Massachusetts Liberty Act. The mob taunted and threatened them and yelled obscenities at Drayton and his collaborators. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was unconstitutional, as it required states to violate their own laws in protecting slavery. For sheer creativity and daring, few slave escapes can match the 1848 getaway masterminded by William and Ellen Craft. These were run by British firms; since the U.S. independence in 1783 Britain had begun to welcome fugitive slaves from the United States, to the point of creating a military unit of them, the Corps of Colonial Marines. The aftermath was brutal for the slaves who dared to escape. The act was passed on September 18, 1850, and it was repealed on June 28, 1864. “My whole future depended upon the decision of this conductor,” he later wrote. He desperately hoped the papers would be enough to lead him to freedom, but there was a major obstacle: he bore hardly any resemblance to the man listed in the documents. “All on board were…made prisoner without bloodshed, although it was evident that the slaves would have resisted if there were any chance of escape,” wrote a local newspaper. His incredible story made him a minor celebrity in New England, but he was soon forced to flee the country after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Underground Railroad had developed as a way in which free blacks and whites (and sometimes other slaves) aided fugitive slaves to reach freedom in northern states or Canada. In the United States, "fugitive slaves" (also known as runaway slaves) were enslaved people who left their master and traveled without authorization;[1] generally they tried to reach states or territories where slavery was banned, including Canada, or, until 1821, Spanish Florida. The act authorized federal marshals to require Northern citizen bystanders to aid in the capturing of runaways. The Underground Railroad was a network of black and white abolitionists between 1645 and the end of the Civil War who helped fugitive slaves escape to freedom. During this time, there were numerous bounties on her head throughout the South, payable to anyone who could capture her and bring her back to slavery. In practice, both citizens and governments of free states often supported the escape of fugitive slaves. Because of this, fugitive slaves tried to leave the United States altogether, traveling to Canada or Mexico. William, meanwhile, assumed the role of her loyal black manservant.