Any free black people would presumably have any number of other people who knew them in their free state, whether friends, neighbors, family and so on. These people could presumably vouch for them and testify that they are not slaves escaping from so-and-so.
The arguments people are making in this thread are somewhat analogous to saying that anyone nowadays could kidnap any kid and claim it’s their child, because who would believe the kid and you could fake the papers.
I appreciate that it could have been different with blacks back then, but until someone brings actual evidence that it was, the question remains unsettled.
Not hinting at all. Look up the Barbary Pirates who raided the northern Mediterranean and round up the English Channel and even as far afield as Iceland. This is something that should be well-known.
How about this one. It’s not kidnapping if you are not considered anymore than property or subhuman once you cross the Mason-Dixie line. All of the court records are going to show up as property disputes.
Sure, IF you could contact them and get them to come for you without getting kidnapped themselves. There wasn’t any “You get one phone call” back then.
It was my understanding that the northern states had managed to essentially neuter the fugitive slave act as an effective law by finding workarounds on the state level. Does anyone else know if this is true? Looking it up on wikipedia, it mentions how these workarounds were a major motivation for southern secession.
This is really heartbreakingto read, but I guess it isn’t unexpected. Kids were the main target of slavers because nobody listened to them, they had their health in front of them, they were smaller, etc. etc.
However I can’t find how common this is. Was it dozens a year, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? I don’t know. It seems sadly to be a very profitable venture. A slave could get you $500-2000 back when people earned less than a dollar a day.
A white bounty hunter/slave-catcher really cares to listen to the wailing, pleading, filthy-lying-criminal subhuman they’ve just collared.
That the black person they collared can find white people who will vouch for him. Remember we are talking about a racist society, where a black person isn’t in a legal or social position to “vouch” for anything. He may have tons of best pals, but if they’re black their word means absolutely nothing. And we’re talking about someone being enslaved. Who they hell wouldn’t lie to protect their friend from that?
That the white people who will vouch for him have some real authority. I mean, what is the schoolteacher really going to do if the bounty hunter snatches the nice darkie who busted up her chifferobe that one time? Write a sternly worded letter to the Women’s League?
If you’re a recently freed slave who has just moved into town, even friendly whites might think, “Hey, this guy could be anyone. He might just be a runaway for all I know.”
I don’t have to look up the Barbary pirates, either. You seem to be angry that no recent popular entertainment has been based on whites being enslaved. Why the anger? General history is documentary fodder. Feature films need specific human stories to work. And somebody who wants to produce those stories.
The numbers of white folks captured by pirates & enslaved hardly compares with the African slave trade. Weren’t many of them eventually ransomed? Far more eventually returned home than African slaves did. Actually, I think the Irish sent into permanent exile in the New World by Cromwell, et al., had more drama. Still, I doubt BBC will ever come up with a documentary…
It’s likely impossible to know just how prevalent such kidnappings were, but even during the Civil War, it was believed to be extensive. See, for example, this letter received by Lincoln in 1863.
Sure, but documentation wouldn’t keep a free person from being kidnapped and sold. If a black man had papers showing he was free, the slaver just took them and burned them. Done.
Just to remind everyone of the precise circumstances portrayed in the movie, Northup, a resident of upstate New York, was convinced to accompany two men to Washington, DC believing he was being provided work as a musician. He was then drugged and kidnapped, and surrepticiously transported to Louisiana. There he was brought before a judge, where a man he had never met claimed that he (Northup) was a runaway slave named Platt, and the man’s lost property. Northup was asked if had any papers proving he was not the person the man said he was; he of course did not, and that was that.
There simply was no chance for anyone to vouch for him at the time of his enslavement, and the film shows that several later attempts he made to get word to persons he knew back home were thwarted, and in fact put him at high risk of murder.
Now, for me focusing on how many of these kind of kidnappings may have occurred rather misses the point. The circumstances of Northup’s confinement and eventual freedom are relevant mainly for the fact that this made it possible for a story of slavery from the inside to have been told; had he been the usual, illiterate slave held captive from birth or childhood, and died on the plantation, his story probably would never have seen the light of day. A major point of the film is that while Northup was indeed released, he left behind dozens of people (on that one plantation alone) who would continue to be subject to the most apalling abuse, some to the end of their lives.
Slavery in the US did not end with the Emancipation. It continued in two ways. The larger way was Peonage. The other way, which continued into the 1960s, was Convict Leases.
Peonage was a twisted, extreme form of share-cropping, and people who tried to escape were beaten or killed.
Convict Lease was a legal construct that allowed farmers and businesses to pay the local sheriff to arrest people on phony charges and press them into servitude. Corrupt lawmen would pick up “vagrants” to fill the orders with able-bodied (mostly) black men to work in the fields from sunup to sundown.
A free black person might have had white friends, but the kidnappers usually took their victims hundreds of miles away from where they were captured. Even if you wanted to help, you often did not have the time or money to travel to testify and even then it would just be argued you were just abolitionists who never knew the black person at all and were just stirring up trouble.
Like I always say, the hardest thing for people to do is understand that people in the past thought differently than we do. We look at the situation through 21st century eyes* and many of our internalized assumptions did not exist in the early 19th century.
BTW, the Personal Liberty Laws were exactly the reason the South seceded – according tothe secessionists themselves.
*My corollary for that is that people will vehemently deny that they’re doing that, even when their assumptions are in every sentence the write on the subject.
How? Nobody kidnaps someone and goes around town to check whether anyone will vouch for them before they sell them into slavery. Get serious.
Not even close. Nobody who buys a slave gives a damn where it came from. It’s a slave. Who cares? Nobody is coming to get him and present papers or vouch for him and get him back.
It’s incredibly easy to imagine it happening, as it did.
The North in this era, especially Philadelphia, was characterized by considerable resentment towards free blacks, especially those that were successful. There were repeated anti black riots, where whites attacked black people in the streets and destroyed black business, churches, schools, and residential areas.
So black Americans really didn’t have the protection of the law; in many respects they were persona non grata. In many cases they did organize to defend themselves against kidnapping.
This brings up an interesting point; among the free population in the early 19th century, who did carry identifying documents or papers of any kind? You’d think that the plaintiff would have had to provide affirmative evidence of the supposed slave’s identity, and that the slave belonged to him.
And what good would it do to have your local Northern friends and family come down to vouch for you? If they were black, their testimony was probably inadmissible, never mind the grave personal risk they would run by attempting to provide it.
