Home > Scholarship > The Underground Railroad in Connecticut

The Underground Railroad in Connecticut

Excerpted from Horatio T. Strother, The Underground Railroad in Connecticut (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 10-24.

Chapter 1: Blazing the Trail

There had always been runaway bondsmen in Connecticut. In 1643, just four years after the first slave set foot on the colony's soil, the Articles of Confederation between the United Colonies of New England — Massachusetts, New Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven — provided that "if any servant run away from his master into any of these confederated jurisdictions, that, in such case, upon certificate of one magistrate in the jurisdiction of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proof, the said servant shall be delivered, either to his master or any other, that pursues and brings such certificate of proof." [1] Such was Connecticut's first fugitive slave law — although the runaways to whom it referred were likely to be white indentured servants or apprentices rather than Negro slaves, who in 1643 were a mere handful.

In 1680 the number of slaves was still only thirty. And in the very next year, one of these became Connecticut's first known runaway Negro. This was a certain Jack, property of Sam Wolcott of Wethersfield. He was said to be a shiftless slave, his master a merciless man. One day in June, 1681, this unpleasant relationship ended; Jack ran off and set out on a journey northward. Along the way he managed to steal a gun, but it had no flint and he abandoned it in a woodland. Eventually he reached Springfield, Massachusetts, where his journey ended on the first of July:

Anthony Dorcester saith that today ahout noone this Negroe came to his house & after asking for a pipe of Tobacco, I told him there was some on the table, he tooke my knife & cut some & then put it in his pocket & after he tooke down a cutlass & offered to draw it but it coming out I closed in upon him & so Bound him with the help of my wife & daughter when he scrambling in his Pocket I suspected he might have a knife & searching found my knife naked in his Pocket which he would faine have got out but I prevented him &; tooke it away. ... I committed the Negroe to Prison there to remain & be safely secured till discharged by Authority. [2]

Jack apparently set an example that others were ready to follow, for a law of 1690 provided that no Negro servant was to be ferried across any stream unless he had a certificate. [3] It is obvious that even at this early date fugitives were becoming a problem ; and at least some of them were finding friends among Connecticut's respectable citizens. In 1702 a mulatto slave named Abda fled from his owner, Captain Thomas Richards of Hartford, and was secreted by Captain Joseph Wadsworth of the same place. Some time later, when the town constable approached him with a writ to reclaim the fugitive, Wadsworth resisted, and the case was brought before the governor and council for decision. As a man of partly Caucasian descent, Abda filed a countersuit against Captain Richards, asking damages of twenty pounds sterling "for his unjust holding and detaining the said Abda in his service as his bondman." But Governor Saltonstall made short work of Abda's case and of similar cases that might arise later. In one breath, he consigned "all persons born of Negro bondwomen" to slavery. Abda was returned to his owner. [4]

Others who went farther were likely to fare better, for Massachusetts soon proved to be a fairly safe refuge for Connecticut runaways. In Pittsfield, it was reported, many became house servants for respectable families. Springfield, where "sympathy for the slave, fleeing from bondage, was often manifested . . . years before the odious fugitive slave law," was a special magnet. [5]

It must not be supposed, however, that the runaway was automatically safe as soon as he reached Massachusetts. Harboring a fugitive slave, even at that period, could be a dangerous business. In the town of Wilbraham, for example, an elderly and honored magistrate of Hampden County "suffered a serious injury in his own house, in an ineffectual attempt to protect a colored man in his employ from being seized and dragged back to slavery in Connecticut." [6] The state legislature, too, evinced little friendship for Negroes in general and fugitives in particular when, in 1788, it adopted a measure providing that "Africans not subjects of Morocco or citizens of one of the United States are to be sent out of the State." Of the persons expelled under this law, twenty-one were from Connecticut. [7] Some of these were undoubtedly freemen, since during this period one frequently finds on record in Connecticut applications to selectmen to "free the master from responsibility in case of emancipated slaves." [8]

An emancipation movement struggling to be born; a restless urge for freedom among those enslaved — these were the twin sources from which the Underground Railroad arose, and both were evident in Connecticut in the early 1770's. It was a time of ferment ; new ideas of liberty and the rights of man were in the air. Antislavery pamphlets and books were beginning to appear from the pens of such writers as John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and Thomas Paine. [9] Very soon Thomas Jefferson was to-draft a document stating, among other things, that "all men are created equal" ; and already there were those who, in general agreement with such views, were prepared to speak for complete freedom and equality for Connecticut's 6500 slaves. One such was Aaron Cleveland of Norwich, hatter, poet, legislator, "minister of the gospel and tribune of the people," who in 1775 published an antislavery poem, and who has been recognized as the first writer in Connecticut "to call in question the lawfulness of slavery and to argue against it." [10] This position was too advanced for the time, but in the previous year the General Assembly had taken a first halting step toward abolition in a measure providing that "no Indian, negro, or mulatto slave shall at any time hereafter be brought or imported into this State, by sea or land." Thereafter, the courts were "inclined towards the support of liberal interpretations of the antislavery laws." [11]

After the Revolution, that basic lesson in freedom, the General Assembly moved further toward universal emancipation. A law of 1784 provided that no Negro or mulatto born in Connecticut after March 1 of that year was to be held as a slave after reaching the age of twenty-five. This law was soon followed by further measures in the same direction. An enactment of May, 1792, gave teeth to the 1784 law by defining penalties for its violation; anyone who removed from Connecticut a slave who was entitled to freedom at twenty-five would be punished by "a fine of $334, half of which should go to the plaintiff and half to the State." The same session of the Assembly also enacted that all slaves between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five were entitled to freedom. A measure of 1797 took an additional step, decreeing that no Negro or mulatto born after August of that year should remain a slave after reaching the age of twenty-one. But complete and final emancipation did not come to Connecticut until 1848.

Meanwhile, the state's slaves had been busy emancipating themselves by direct action, sometimes through their sole effort, sometimes with the help of their friends — or their country's enemies. The British were perfectly aware that some damage could be done the American cause by encouraging slaves to escape. Indeed, as early as 1768, a New London citizen of "probity" heard three English officers agree that "if the Negroes were made freemen, they should be sufficient to subdue those damn'd Rascals." [12] In the general unrest and the near presence of British troops, slaves saw a handy avenue to freedom. One is known to have escaped from his owner in Colchester to the enemy lines in 1776, and in the same year three other runaways found refuge on a British vessel in New Haven harbor. [13]

Of those who made the break for freedom alone, many — unlike their Southern counterparts of later decades — seem to have helped themselves to their masters' wardrobes or other valuable articles. Thus a fugitive from Stamford ran off with a felt hat, a gray cut wig, a lapelled vest, several pairs of stockings, two pairs of shoes, a small hatchet, and a violin. [14] A Hartford runaway of 1777 also took his master's violin, presumably for his entertainment along the way ; while the owner of another violin-stealing fugitive shrugged off his loss with the remark that the thief was a "miserable performer." [15]

Not all the runaways in Connecticut at this time were friendless, however. A classic example was set by citizens of Hebron and the vicinity, when seven or eight men from South Carolina attempted to kidnap a slave there in 1788. There was hardly a man in the neighborhood, it is reported, who failed to resist the abduction; and after a council of war among residents of Hebron, East Haddam, and East Hampton, the Negro was rescued and set free. [16]

Ten years later, in the northwest corner of the state, citizens of Norfolk rallied with equal wholeheartedness to the support of another runaway. This was James Mars, who in 1798 was only eight years of age. He lived in Canaan, and by the provisions of the law of 1784 his legal freedom was just seventeen years away. However, his owner — a Mr. Thompson, a minister and a strong proslavery spokesman — planned to take James and his family to Virginia, where he would sell them to a planter. In what was to have been his last sermon to the people of Canaan, Thompson said that his chattels were fine slaves and would bring him at least two thousand dollars in the Southern market.

James' father, however, had other ideas. Though he was only "a slave without education," yet he was a vigilant man ; and as a father, he was naturally greatly concerned for the welfare of his wife, his daughter, and his two sons. He saw and heard much, kept it to himself — and planned his family's escape. He knew there was some ill feeling between Canaan and Norfolk, so to Norfolk they would go. Accordingly, he hitched up the parson's team in the dark of night, put his few possessions and his family aboard the wagon, and set out. The trip was not without incident — among other things, they ran afoul of someone's woodpile in the darkness — but they reached Norfolk well before daylight. There they found refuge in Pettibone's tavern, whose owner, like his descendants, was a friend of fugitive slaves. He welcomed the Mars family, helped them unload, and gave them a resting place for the balance of the night. But the tavern obviously could not be a permanent refuge. Of what happened next, James wrote many years later :

It was soon known in the morning that we were in Norfolk; the first enquiry was where will they be safe. The place was soon found. There was a man by the name of Phelps that had a house that was not occupied; it was out of the way and out of sight. After breakfast, we went to the house ; it was well located ; it needed some cleaning and that my mother could do as well as the next woman. . . . Days and weeks passed on and we began to feel quite happy, hoping that the parson had gone South.

But Thompson had not gone, and after some time the word spread that he was planning to recapture his slaves — particularly James and his brother Joseph. Therefore a Mr. Cady, who lived next door to Phelps, volunteered to take the boys to a place where they would be safe. At twilight he led them over hills and through woods, over rocks and fallen logs. At one point they came out on top of Burr Mountain, in the northwest corner of the township. "We could look down in low grounds," said James, "and see logs that were laid for the road across the meadow; at every flash they could be seen, but when it did not lighten, we could not see any thing; we kept on, our pilot knew the way." He led them down from the hills toward the center of town, and so to the Tibbals house.

Here the boys were welcomed by "an old man, a middle aged man and his wife and four children. . . . We had not been there long," James continued, "before it was thought best that my brother should be still more out of the way, as he was about six years older than I, which made him an object of greater search, and they were at a loss where to send him, as he was then about fourteen years of age." Fortunately for Joseph, a young man named Butler, who was visiting in the neighborhood, agreed to take him to Massachusetts.

James, meanwhile, remained with the Tibbals for "a few days," after which he rejoined his parents and sister at the Phelps house. But before he arrived there, Thompson had come and gone; he had left James' mother with this proposition : "If she would go to Canaan and see to his things and pack them up for him, then if she did not want to go [to Virginia], she need not." Since this was a bargain, James and his sister were obliged to return to Canaan with their parents. Still the parson, mindful of the profits from the Virginia auction block, was not satisfied — he wanted Joseph. Hence he demanded that James' father search for him and bring him back. Now was the time for the elder Mars to act, and again he plotted to rescue his family. With Thompson's team of horses, he slipped his family away along the familiar route to Norfolk. Reaching Captain Lawrence's tavern there about two in the morning, they were given lodging for the night ; then, to make their recovery more difficult, the Captain advised them to disperse and hide in different houses in the neighborhood.

James, at the outset, was passed to the home of an old woman nearby. "I stopped with her a few days, with instructions to keep still. You may wonder why I was sent to such a place ; most likely it was thought that she had so little room that she would not be suspected of harboring a fugitive." A man named Walter frequently stopped by "to see how his boy did"; he told James that, if anyone else came to the house, he "must get under the bed." After several days of this hole-and-corner life, James was moved again, spirited from house to house through a chain of hiding places. "I was sent to Mr. Pease, well nigh Canaan, and kept rather dark. I was there for a time, and then I went to stay with a man by the name of Akins, and stayed with him a few days, and went to a man by the name of Foot, and was with him a few days." Finally, he said, "I went to another man by the name of Akins, and was there some time."

While James was being whisked about in this fashion, Thompson decided to sell him and Joseph on the spot ; and to encourage the boys to appear on the scene, he allowed their parents to select the persons to whom they might be sold. Thus, when they came home in September of 1798, their new owners had been decided upon. Mr. Munger of Norfolk agreed to pay Thompson $100 for James, while Mr. Bingham of Salisbury undertook to pay the same for Joseph. Had there been a well-organized underground system in the community, this transaction might never have materialized. At any rate, James' parents and sister were set free, while Joseph, it is supposed, remained a slave until he reached the age of twenty-five. James, on the other hand — after the death of Mr. Munger — became a freeman at twenty-one, married, and settled down in Norfolk for the balance of his fruitful life. [17]

The help that the Mars boys received from so many individuals bespeaks a widespread sympathy for the fugitive in the northwestern part of the state, as well as some embryonic sort of organization on a local scale. Even so prominent a citizen as Judge Tapping Reeve, the eminent jurist and Federalist leader, was involved to some extent. He acquired a reputation for helping runaways, and it is said that several of them sought him out at his famous law school in Litchfield "simply from hearing about him." [18]

But there were still slaveowners in Connecticut; and others of them than Parson Thompson were minded to dispose of their chattels in the South. Some tried persuasion, telling their slaves of the soft climate that awaited them, in contrast to the severity of New England winters. Some were more blunt. On the Hanchet estate, near Suffield, a rumor spread that Master would take his Negroes South and sell them ; and when Hanchet told them to pack their clothes and get ready to go to Maryland, "there was a great outburst of excitement and tears" among his eleven slaves. As might have been expected, the day set for departure found only the oldest and the youngest on the farm. The rest had taken flight. Hanchet was furious, and he "spent some weeks in a most energetic effort" to recover them. As a last resort, he hired two slave-hunters from Maryland to find them for him.

The fugitives meanwhile had split into several groups. One, consisting of Titus and Phill, took shelter in "a sort of cave in the side of a mountain." Another group hid in an old dugout above Enfield Falls ; here they were found by another colored slave named Ned, who provided them with food and kept them informed of developments. The two girls who made up the third group, Lize and Betty, wandered in the woods until they became thoroughly bewildered and finally separated.

Lize, somehow, struggled on through a notch "near the Rising Corners," where next morning members of the Eldad Loomis family found her nearly exhausted. They comforted the weary girl and took her to their home. During the day they concealed her in an attic; in the evenings, they discreetly kept her out of view of any neighbors who might come visiting.

Betty, left alone, strayed farther north over the Massachusetts border, where she encountered the Indians of Agawam. These people had themselves been slaves; they immediately sensed Betty's situation and made her feel at home. Subsequently, however, the Maryland slave-hunters picked up Betty's tracks, and at length they reached the Indian village. One of them addressed the chief :

"Who were those colored girls that came here the other day?" "Who say colored gal come?" "But you know they did, and now if you will give them to us we will give you what you ask." "How much that?" "Will ten dollars be enough?" "No!" "How much then?" "White man listen. Injun hunt. Injun fish. Injun fight, but no Injun hunt blachies. White man better go home."

The slave-hunters were beaten, and they knew it; they went back to Suffield. Hanchet was beaten too ; he set out for Maryland, leaving his quondam slaves to enjoy the freedom they had won by taking it. [19]

How many runaways made good their escape in the decades from 1790 to 1820 is not known, but flights were common enough. Such advertisements as the following were a frequent sight in many Connecticut newspapers of the period :

Run away from me the subscriber about the 28th of February last, a Negro Man named London, about 50 years of age, had on when he went away a strait bodied blue coat and leather breeches, as to his other cloathing I am not certain ; he is a middling sized fellow, speake faint and slow, but tolerable good English, is a crafty subtle sly fellow, and has and can pretend sickness when well. Whoever will apprehend said Negro and bring him to me in Hartford, or secure him in any gaol in this or the neighbouring States and send me word so that I may have him again, shall have 50 dollars reward and all necessary charges paid. I also forewarn all persons from either harboring, secreting or employing said Negro, as they will answer the same at the peril of the law. (1790)

Ranaway, from the Subscriber [in Greenwich] on the ninth inst., a negro man named James, nearly 18 years of age and about 5 feet 10 in. high : took with him at the time a brown cloth coatee & pantaloons a light figured cotton vest and tow cloth frock and trousers. He is marked by a scar obliquely across the ridge of his nose and others on his feet, particularly a large one on his left foot just back of the small toe, occasioned by the cut of an axe, which causes it to be stiffened. All persons are hereby cautioned not to harbor said runaway : and whoever will give information of him so that he can be obtained by the subscriber (to whom he is bound until he is 21 years of age) shall be liberally rewarded. (1813)

One of the last notices of this sort appeared in the Connecticut Courant of August 5, 1823. In it Elijah Billings of Somers announced that a mulatto boy named William Lewis had run away from him. Billings apparently had little use for the lad, however, for the last words of the advertisement were : "Any person who will return said boy shall receive one cent reward and no charges paid." [20]

Meanwhile, sentiment not merely in favor of runaway slaves but against the entire institution of slavery was becoming manifest among Connecticut's citizens. In Glastonbury, Hancy Z. Smith and her five daughters originated the first antislavery petition in the United States, circulated it among their neighbors, and forwarded it to Congress with forty signatures. They held frequent antislavery meetings in their dooryard, where a large door mounted on a sturdy tree stump made a platform for the speaker. They lectured in the cause themselves and distributed abolitionist literature. As acknowledged independents, they had little to lose by their activities. [21]

Abolitionist sentiment was sufficiently widespread by 1790 to result in the formation of a Connecticut antislavery society in that year — its resounding title was "The Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and for the Relief of Persons Holden in Bondage." Its president was Ezra Stiles, the theologian who had been president of Yale College since 1778; Judge Simeon Baldwin was secretary. Under vigorous leadership, the Society "speedily showed great activity." On January 7, 1791, it sent off a petition to Congress, setting forth its position and demanding action. This document stated that, although the Society was of recent origin, its work had "become generally extensive through the State" and reflected the sentiments of a large majority of citizens. "From a sober conviction of the unrighteousness of slavery," it went on, "your petitioners have long beheld with grief a considerable number of our fellow-men doomed to perpetual bondage. . . . The whole system of African slavery is unjust in its nature, impolitic in its principles, and in its consequences ruinous to the industry and enterprise of the citizens of these States." In conclusion, it requested that Congress should use all constitutional means to prevent "the horrors of the slave-trade . . . prohibit the citizens of the United States from carrying on the trade . . . prohibit foreigners from fitting out vessels in the United States for transporting persons from Africa . . . and alleviate the sufferings of those who are now in slavery, and check the further progress of this inhuman commerce." The petition met a cool reception in Congress. It was referred to a special committee, where it quietly died. [22]

Before this same society, later in the year, Jonathan Edwards Jr. unequivocally stated the moral necessity of immediate emancipation. "To hold a man in a state of slavery who has a right to his liberty," he said, "is to be every day guilty of robbing him of his liberty, or of manstealing, and is greater sin in the sight of God than concubinage or fornication. . . . Every man who cannot show that his negro hath by his voluntary conduct forfeited his liberty, is obliged immediately to manumit him." [23] Edwards thus foreshadowed the opinion of Judge Theophilus Harrington of Vermont, who would accept nothing less than "a bill of sale from God Almighty" as valid proof of one man's ownership of another. [24]

The next two decades produced other influential spokesmen in the antislavery cause — men like Alexander McLeod, George Bourne, and Thomas Branagan, who saw in the South's "peculiar institution" nothing but immorality, barbarism, and degradation for master and slave alike. No one of these, it is true, wrote or published in Connecticut, but their works were circulated widely and in some cases for many years. [25]

However, the time had not yet come when a majority of Connecticut's ordinary citizens shared such views. Side by side with sympathy for the escaping slave, and overshadowing it in the minds of many, was the feeling that the free Negro was a problem. The number of slaves in the "Land of Steady Habits" had shrunk to insignificance by 1820, but the number of free persons of color had risen to 7844 — nearly 3 per cent of the total population — and not a few people were disturbed by the effects this increase might have on the state's settled ways. [26] To some of these, the idea of establishing a colony for free Negroes in western Africa appealed as a practical and not inhumane solution to a perplexing question.

The plan of colonization arose in Washington, D. C., where men from North and South assembled in 1816 to discuss the "growing evil" of the free Negro population. From this meeting came the simple solution: send them back to Africa; and the American Colonization Society was forthwith formed for that purpose. [27] In the next year the Society sent two representatives to the west coast of Africa to investigate the possibility of establishing a Negro colony there. Both these emissaries were ministers, the Reverend Samuel J. Mills of Connecticut and the Reverend Ebenezer Burgess of Massachusetts ; and both had the honest belief that colonization would encourage emancipation. They completed their mission and recommended a site. It was not, as things turned out, the place where the first American asylum for free Negroes was established, yet Mills and Burgess may be called the pioneers of the Liberian settlement. [28]

The colonization movement gained ground apace. Beginning in 1820, the Connecticut Colonization Society met annually at Hartford, and auxiliaries of this group sprang up in many sections of the state — among them, a juvenile association formed in Middletown in 1828. [29] From the very beginning, however, the genuine friends of colored people saw the colonization scheme as a sort of "gentleman's agreement" between free and slave states. It was nicely calculated to drain off the insurrectionary free Negroes of the South and to strengthen the bonds of the slave system, thus serving an economic purpose. In the North, however, colonization would reduce the number of Negroes and work against the amalgamation or equalization of races — effects that would be primarily social. [30]

However good or evil the intentions of the colonizationists, one outcome of their activity was certainly to dampen the growing ardor for abolition. At least partly as a result of their work, the decade 1820—1830 was "a period of general apathy and indifference on the subject of slavery and the wrongs and needs of the colored race." [31] The colonizationists were concerned only with the free Negroes, and by focusing a spotlight in that direction, they distracted attention from the larger matter of slavery itself and from the increasingly unbearable plight of the slaves. Antislavery writings became less frequent and generally milder in tone than they had been in preceding decades. [32] The country as a whole — and Connecticut with it — was lulled into a false sense of complacency by the Missouri Compromise and by colonizationist propaganda. As a leading abolitionist said later, it began to take on the appearance of a nation "slumbering in the lap of moral death." [33]