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Yo! You need to select and post text from the perspective of people who escaped slavery.

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1. Henry "Box" Brown

After his wife and children were sold and shipped away to another state in 1848, Virginia-born Henry Brown resolved to escape slavery by any means necessary. With the help of a free black and a white shopkeeper, he hatched a desperate plan to ship himself from Richmond to Philadelphia in a wooden crate. On March 23, 1849, Brown wedged himself into a three by two foot box labeled "dry goods" and settled in for a long journey via wagon, steamboat and railroad to the home of abolitionist James Miller McKim. He only had a few biscuits and some water as supplies, and during one leg of the trip, his crate was placed upside down on the deck of a steamship. Brown was left sitting on his head for 90 minutes, his eyes "swelling as if they would burst from their sockets." He nearly passed out before two unsuspecting passengers flipped the box over to use it as a seat.

Brown arrived safely in Philadelphia after 27 grueling hours inside the cramped confines of the box. 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. "Box" Brown later spent several years in Great Britain hosting a stage act that documented his escape. He eventually returned to the United States in 1875 and worked as a magician. As part of each show, he would climb into the same wooden crate that had once carried him to freedom.

2. Frederick Douglass

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. 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. 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. When the conductor came to collect tickets and check the black passengers' papers, Douglass was nearly overcome with trepidation. "My whole future depended upon the decision of this conductor," he later wrote. Luckily for Douglass, the man only gave the phony sailors' pass a cursory glance before moving on to the next passenger.

Douglass would endure even more close calls as he made his way north by train and ferry. He encountered an old acquaintance on a riverboat, and was nearly spotted by a ship captain he had once worked for. After several tense hours, he arrived in New York, where he hid in the home of an anti-slavery activist and rendezvoused with Murray. The couple later moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Douglass established himself as one of the nation's leading abolitionists. He remained a fugitive slave under the law until 1846, when supporters helped him purchase his freedom from his former master.

3. Robert Smalls

Robert Smalls' incredible flight to freedom began in 1862, when he was working as a wheelman aboard the Confederate steamer CSS Planter in Charleston, South Carolina. When the Planter's white crew took an unauthorized shore leave in the early hours of May 13, Smalls and several accomplices sprang into action. After commandeering the ship, the slaves picked up their families at a rendezvous point and steamed into Charleston Harbor with Smalls at the helm disguised in the captain's coat and hat. Smalls knew both the ship and the mine-infested harbor like the back of his hand, and he was able to give the proper signals to win safe passage by Fort Sumter. Once out of the Confederate guns' firing range, he poured on the speed and made a mad dash for the Union blockade. Arriving under the white flag of surrender, the crew of runaways joyously offered up their ship to first U.S. Navy vessel they encountered. "Good morning, sir!" Smalls shouted to the astonished captain. "I have brought you some of the old United States' guns, sir!"

Smalls and his fellow escapees were hailed as heroes in the North, and their courage and cunning were held up as evidence that blacks could make good soldiers. Smalls later helped recruit as many as 5,000 blacks for the Union war effort, and served as the pilot and then later the captain of the Planter after it was refitted as a U.S. Navy vessel. After the war, he returned to South Carolina, bought his former master's house and went on to serve several terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

4. Harriet Jacobs

For Harriet Jacobs, escaping slavery meant hiding for several years in a prison of her own devising. Born a slave in North Carolina, Jacobs spent her teenage years living in fear of a cruel master who refused to let her marry and made repeated and increasingly brutal sexual advances toward her. When the harassment continued even after Jacobs had two children by another man, she resolved to make a break for freedom. In 1835, she fled her plantation and briefly hid in some friends' houses. Knowing her chances of making it to the North were slim, she eventually holed up in a small attic crawlspace in her grandmother's home. 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. From there, she proceeded by train to New York and reunited with family members. She spent the next few years working in New York and Boston, but remained wary of being captured by her former master until friends helped arrange her purchase and manumission. Jacobs later became an influential abolitionist and published a searing account of her ordeal called "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."

5. William and Ellen Craft

For sheer creativity and daring, few slave escapes can match the 1848 getaway masterminded by William and Ellen Craft. The two had married in Macon, Georgia, in 1846, but were held in slavery by different masters. Terrified of being separated, they devised an ingenious plan to flee the Deep South for Philadelphia. The light-skinned Ellen cut her hair short, dressed herself in men's clothing and wrapped her head in bandages to pose as an injured white man. William, meanwhile, assumed the role of her loyal black manservant. On December 21, 1848, the Crafts donned their disguises and boarded a train to begin the long journey North. The scheme seemed doomed from the very start after Ellen found herself sitting next to a close friend of her master, but her elaborate costume prevented her from being recognized.

The Crafts spent the next several days traveling by train and steamer through the South, lodging in fine hotels and rubbing elbows with upper class whites to maintain their cover. 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. Luckily for the Crafts, the captain of their previous ship happened to pass by and agreed to sign for her. The Crafts arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day and were sheltered by abolitionists before continuing on to Boston. Fearing slave hunters, the couple later set sail for England, where they wrote a popular account of their escape and raised a family.

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After his wife and children were sold and shipped away to another state in 1848, Virginia-born Henry Brown resolved to escape slavery by any means necessary. With the help of a free black and a white shopkeeper, he hatched a desperate plan to ship himself from Richmond to Philadelphia in a wooden crate.

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8.

Runaways

Discussion questions
"The hour was now come," recalls James Pennington of his escape from slavery, "and the man must act and be free, or remain a slave for ever . . . if I did not meet the crisis that day, I should be self-doomed." Self-doomed . . . yet many slaves knew well that a failed escape risked doom. "No use running from bad to worse," advised Martin Jackson's father, adding that "the War wasn't going to last forever [and] our forever was going to be spent living among the Southerners, after they got licked." Deciding to run away was a complicated decision with many factors to weigh. Here we look at the individual's decision to run away (or not) and the direct consequences of escape. In the next Theme, COMMUNITY, we will consider the organized aspects of escape including the Underground Railroad and fugitive-aid organizations.

1. Virginia runaway ads. Runaway advertisements may seem an unlikely source for insight into runaways' motives and plans, for they are usually boilerplate listings of names, physical descriptions, and rewards offered. In many, however, such as these thirty-five Virginia ads in the 1700s, the slaveholders reveal much about the runaways' intentions and potential success, either directly ("he is so ingenious a fellow, that he can turn his hand to anything") or indirectly ("he has been much whipped, which his Back will show"). What common traits do you find among the fugitives? When do several slaves escape together? Included are the escape and capture notices of two fugitives: why might their attempts have failed?

2. A runaway's explanation. Before fleeing north from Maryland in 1827, Anthony Chase wrote an explanatory letter to Jeremiah Hoffman, to whom he had been hired out by his owner. "[W]hat can a man do," he laments, "who has his hands bound and his feet fettered?" He vows to recompense his owner's widow (who had refused to free Chase as promised in her husband's will) in order "to prove to her and to [the] world that I don't mean to be dishonest." A testament to the heart-rending decision to run away, especially with Chase's insistent P.S. exonerating his wife of involvement, this letter was archived with the papers of Hoffman's father in the Maryland Historical Society. We do not know what happened to Anthony Chase.

3. Escape to Canada: The Littles' narratives. John Little and his wife (whose first name we do not know) were married in Tennessee when enslaved on the same plantation. They escaped in 1841, crossing the Ohio River, trekking across Illinois to reach Chicago, traveling by train to Detroit, and then crossing into Canada, where they settled in the backcountry and began farming. Fourteen years later in 1855, a Boston journalist and abolitionist, Benjamin Drew, recorded their narratives of escape, privation, and near-capture. "I was hunted like a wolf in the mountains," Little recounted, "all the way to Canada." Here we present excerpts from John Little's narrative with sidebars from his wife's shorter but equally revealing narrative.

4. Escape to Canada: William Wells Brown narrative. "I would dream at night that I was in Canada," remembers William Wells Brown of his enslaved childhood, "and on waking in the morning, weep to find myself so sadly mistaken." Born in Kentucky in 1814, Brown twice attempted to escape but was captured both times. At age twenty he succeeded by fleeing from a steamboat on the Ohio River and traveling across Ohio to Cleveland, as we read in these excerpts from his 1847 narrative. What led to his "intense agony" the night before his escape? Why did he not fear death during his flight? How did he feel during his first days as a free man? How did he choose his name as a free man?

5. On running away. Finally, we read the accounts of seventeen formerly enslaved people interviewed in the 1930s through the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal agency under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Six recount their own escapes from slavery; others describe helping runaways, witnessing punishments, planning their own escapes, reuniting with a fugitive parent, and seeing long-hidden fugitives "come out from the woods from all directions" when the Civil War ended. "This is what I know, not what somebody else say," we are assured by Margrett Nickerson, interviewed over seventy years after emancipation, "I seen this myself."

Compare these readings with the narratives of two Underground Railroad "conductors" in Theme III: COMMUNITY, #7: Fugitives, and with fugitives' letters to their former slaveholders in Theme IV: IDENTITY, #2, Slave to Free. (31 pages.)

1. What factors complicated a person's decision to flee slavery?

2. When and how did they take family members with them?

3. Why did some fugitives return willingly to their plantations?

4. Enumerate the instances of courage, quick-thinking, aid, and luck that influenced the successful escapes.

5. What factors led to failed escapes?

6. Why did some enslaved persons choose not to attempt an escape (or a second escape)?

7. How do successful runaway slaves describe their lives in freedom (before 1865)? What challenges remained?

8. What acts (and attitudes) of slave resistance are represented in the runaway advertisements?

9. In the ads, how do the slaveholders exhibit a veiled respect for their runaway slaves?

10. What attitudes toward slavery in general emanate from the slaveholders' ads for runaways?

11. Why does Anthony Chase take the unusual step of writing a letter to explain his escape?

12. Why does he insist that his wife is innocent in his escape?

13. Why do you think Jeremiah Hoffman send money to Chase's owner to compensate her for loss of property?

14. Compare the narratives of John Little and his wife, especially on the details of their escape and on their lives as farmers in Canada. What does each emphasize? Why?

15. Compare the Littles' narratives with that of William Wells Brown, both published before the Civil War. Analyze the similarities and differences in their escapes, the audience for their published memories, and their attitudes toward life as free people.

16. Why is the selection of a new name so important to William Wells Brown after his escape? Why does he choose "Wells Brown"? Why does he keep "William"?

17. Compare the nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives. Consider tone, audience, time span between enslavement and narrative, attitude toward their former slaveholders, and their judgment of their own lives as former slaves and later freemen.

18. Determine the range of attitudes toward running away voiced by the African Americans interviewed in the 1930s. What might explain this range of attitudes, which does not appear in the nineteenth-century narratives?

19. Select of pair of runaway slaves below, and compose an imaginary dialogue between them. Choose a theme for the dialogue (goals for escape, backup plan if caught, message to the twenty-first century, etc.). Include the given quotes:

Framing Questions

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How did enslavement in America affect Africans and their descendants?

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How did enslaved peoples maintain selfhood in the slave-master relationship?

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What aspects of slavery did freed men and women emphasize when relating their experiences?

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How did a person respond to being the slave of another?

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What impact did slavery have on white people?

Printing

Runaway advertisements:

6

Chase letter:

2

Stills' narratives:

9

W. W. Brown narrative:

7

WPA narratives:

7

TOTAL

31 pages

Supplemental Sites

Runaway Journeys, in In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia: 4,000 advertisements for runaway slaves and servants, from Tom Costa and the University of Virginia

Follow the Trail to Freedom in the 1850s, interactive map, from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Beneath the Underground: The Flight to Freedom and Communities in Antebellum Maryland, from the Maryland State Archives

William Still, Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, etc., 1872, full text in digital images, from Maryland State Archives

North American Slave Narratives (18th-19th century), Introduction, Dr. William A. Andrews, UNC-Chapel Hill

Slave narratives, 19th-century, full text in Documenting the American South (UNC-Chapel Hill Library) WPA Slave Narratives, 1930s, full text as digital images, Library of CongressAn Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives, Norman A. Yetman (Library of Congress)

"Should the Slave Narrative Collection Be Used?," by Norman A. Yetman (Library of Congress)

Guidelines for Interviewers in Federal Writers' Project (WPA) on conducting and recording interviews with former slaves, 1937 (PDF)

General Resources in African American History & Literature, 1500-1865

Image: Runaway slave advertisement, no date, no publication. Reproduced by permission of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, #485464.

*PDF file - You will need software on your computer that allows you to read and print Portable Document Format (PDF) files, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have this software, you may download it FREE from Adobe's Web site.

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Fugitive Slaves, Runaways, Enslavement, African American Identity: Vol. I, 1500-1865, Primary Resources in U.S. History and Literature, Toolbox Library, National Humanities Center

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8. Runaways Discussion questions "The hour was now come," recalls James Pennington of his escape from slavery, "and the man must act and be free, or remain a slave for ever . . . if I did not meet the crisis that day, I should be self-doomed." Self-doomed . .

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It has long been believed that a man named Cudjo Lewis was the last living survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the United States. Now a researcher at Newcastle University in Britain says she has discovered testimony from someone who may have lived even longer — a woman named Redoshi.

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The new findings, published last week in the journal Slavery & Abolition, are likely to be subject to scholarly debate, because there are few records documenting the lives of the last Africans to be captured and brought to the United States on slave ships.

Regardless of Redoshi’s precise historical status, the researcher, Hannah Durkin, has pieced together accounts from different sources and census records to carve out the remarkable life of a woman who survived the treacherous Middle Passage voyage at age 12, was sold as a child bride, and lived through the Civil War and the Great Depression. According to Dr. Durkin, Redoshi died in 1937; Lewis died in 1935.