Flee north, p.18
Flee North, page 18
A curious document in the Washington archives makes clear how worried Smallwood had become. In October 1842, ten months after he had met Torrey and begun arranging escapes, Smallwood had persuaded his former enslaver, John Ferguson, to accompany him to the courthouse. There, in the clerk’s office, Ferguson completed the official paperwork attesting to Smallwood’s freedom: “John B. Ferguson, in consideration of five dollars, manumits, his Negro man Thomas Smallwood, who is forty two.” The simple statement might seem puzzling at first, because by his own repeated and detailed testimony, Smallwood had completed the purchase of his freedom by 1830. At this point he had lived as a free resident of Washington for a dozen years, and on file in Prince George’s County was the 1815 manumission that promised Smallwood his freedom at the age of thirty. For years, the two men, who seemed to be mutually respectful neighbors, had not found it necessary to file in court a new legal document proving what they both knew to be true.
But by late 1842 things had changed. Smallwood was playing with fire. He risked his own freedom every time he left his neighborhood to guide a party to Baltimore or beyond. He might well have to prove his freedom to any suspicious white person, whether a constable, a bounty hunter, or merely a busybody. And so he seems to have decided that he needed an up-to-date document establishing his freedom, one he could carry every time he left home or when he possibly had to follow his own path north.
Through the first half of 1843 Smallwood kept up a steady succession of escapes despite his growing sense of danger. But finally he decided that his extra precautions were not enough:
Seeing that through the treachery of some of my color I could be of no further service to my poor slave brethren, and that the cloud of treachery began to thicken, and get blacker and blacker over me, and that Washington was no longer a place of safety for me, I determined to seek a resting place in some other clime, and I was convinced that the place could only be found … to my satisfaction, in the British dominions, where the laws are equal, and know no difference between man and man on account of color.
He would follow the advice he had given to scores of others headed north: you will not be safe on the territory of the United States. In other words, he was headed for Canada.
* * *
On June 30, 1843, Thomas Smallwood left Washington, presumably traveling openly by train and boat with the protection of the manumission paper Ferguson had signed. He made stops in Philadelphia and Albany, mainly to make sure his abolitionist allies there did not believe any of the scurrilous claims that had been made by his enemies, and arrived in Toronto on July 4.
In 1852, Frederick Douglass would ask in a famous oration, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Smallwood, landing on British territory nearly a decade earlier, pondered the same question, as he would recall in his memoir published in 1851, a year before Douglass’s speech:
How different were my feelings that day to what they would have been had I been in the States. There I would have been compelled painfully to witness as I had done for many years their hypocritical demonstrations in honor of a day, which they say, brought to them freedom; but I sorrowfully knew that it was in honor of a day that brought to me, and my race among them, the most degrading, tyrannical and soul-withering bondage that ever disgraced the world or a nation. But here, I was on Canada’s free soil, and I may rejoice and give thanks to God in honor of that day, it being the day on which I first put my feet in a land of true freedom, and equal laws.
It was a reconnaissance trip, to see whether Toronto might be an accommodating home for Smallwood, his wife, their four children, and a fifth on the way. He liked what he saw, but after visiting several small Black communities in Canada West (now Ontario), he hurried home, even as he concluded it would not be home for much longer.
“I speedily returned to Washington,” he wrote, “there to have another contest with slaveholders, and treacherous colored persons, and prepare to take leave of that mock metropolis of freedom, and sink of iniquity.”
Thomas Smallwood, writing as Sam Weller, makes a serious comment in the Albany Weekly Patriot in 1843 about what would later be called racism. Having lived in slavery and then as a free Black man, Smallwood was an astute observer of both crude and subtle discrimination. [Courtesy of Boston Public Library]
11
A Fugitive from Justice
If Smallwood returned to Washington looking for “another contest with the slaveholders,” he got one—and a dire contest with the police as well. In his absence of several weeks, the gossip mill had churned with suspicions about his role in escapes. “On arriving there, I learned that it was rumored about that I was the person that was getting away the slaves and that my visit to the North was to make arrangements to further that object,” he recalled later. “I found it therefore necessary to make speedy arrangements for leaving.”
Even as Smallwood worked on his plan to move his family to Toronto, the Sam Weller letters continued without interruption in the Albany Weekly Patriot. But no longer were there long lists of people who had fled and gleeful ridicule of their former enslavers. Now the letters grew more somber.
One passage illustrated Smallwood’s dilemma as he drew more attention. He denounced a navy officer, a Captain Pendegrass, who had hired an enslaved woman from “the notorious C——s, of Maryland—notorious for their severity to their slaves”—almost certainly the Carroll family, one of the most prominent in the state. The woman had been separated from her children when she was sent by the family to the Navy Yard in Washington, where Pendegrass was stationed. On the advice of Mr. C “not to let her want for whipping,” Smallwood wrote, Pendegrass regularly lashed the woman, evidently in public: “Is he not a fine specimen of a Naval Commander? WOMAN-WHIPPING IN THE NAVY-YARD AT WASHINGTON! How would it sound in London or Rome! Why, the arch Inquisitor would shake his sides for laughter, in scorn of these pretenders to republican freedom.”
Smallwood’s exposure of brutality and his public humiliation of the perpetrator by name, along with the broader point about the hypocrisy of American pretensions to be a land of the free, were vintage Sam Weller. But by writing in such detail about someone living just steps from his house, the man known as “Smallwood of the Yard” surely risked giving his enemies another clue as to the identity of the pseudonymous writer who was instigating escapes and tormenting the enslavers.
Though his focus had generally been on the plight of the enslaved, Smallwood now more often took up for his fellow free African Americans, in passages that underscored his decision to emigrate. Once he reported that while visiting Washington’s city jail to witness the sale of a woman because her enslaver had run up debts, he saw a free Black man brought in and locked in a cell. He had no admiration for the man himself, whose face was bruised and whose clothes were soiled, “very evident marks of the drunken loafer species.” But in his usual spy role, Smallwood found himself deeply disturbed by the conversation he overheard between constable and jailer: they made it clear that this free man was to be illegally stripped of his freedom and sold into bondage.
“He was committed to prison as a runaway slave,” Smallwood recalled, a lawless outrage that captured the impaired citizenship of free Black people. “This is a sample of the petty legal oppressions to which the free colored man is occasionally exposed in this city.” Treatment of Black residents, he said, “depended very much on the caprice of the constables,” including their demands for payoffs that amounted to “barefaced highway robbery.” Smallwood enlarged on this theme, clearly reflecting the disrespect he had personally experienced:
The same disposition is shown in the ordinary intercourse of white people with colored men or women, both bond and free. The tone of command is that which is almost always employed, in addressing them, no matter what the subject may be. To speak to them with respect, would be to descend to their level, in the view of the [white] community. If the tones used are kind, they are still the indications of the kindness of an acknowledged superior, towards one accustomed to be treated as an inferior, for no other reason than their different color.
Smallwood was a perceptive analyst of what would only later be called racism. He was growing steadily less able to tolerate not only the crimes of enslavement but the broader ideology of white supremacy that underlay them. He was scathing about “this Metropolis of free and christian America; whose free institutions (!!) are so much admired,” asking, “Do Americans think that the rest of the world have not sense enough to see and despise their hypocrisy?”
Signing off on another Weller dispatch, he expressed regret that “business”—the business of escapes—forced him to pause in his writing. “I must even leave my pen, which is a matter of regret when I can expose the knavery of the robbers and tyrants who rule this capital of the nation,” he wrote. “I do love to see them snarl as they walk about the District, and note their wincing under my lashes.” But he continued to bear witness to the slave trade: “Why, a fortnight ago, last Tuesday, no less than SIXTY HUMAN BEINGS were carried right by the Capitol yard, to the slave ship. The MEN were chained in couples, and fastened to a log chain, as is common in this region. The women walked by their side. The little children were carried along in wagons.”
For months, Smallwood had been conscious of the increasing attention he was getting from the police—particularly the Auxiliary Guard that had been formed the previous year and that he had repeatedly lambasted, wearing his Sam Weller mask, as a corrupt tool of the slave power. Now, in the fall of 1843, on the eve of his planned departure with his family, as he gathered in his house one more group of prospective northern travelers, he suddenly found the house surrounded by the guard and its leader, John Goddard.
According to what Smallwood later learned, a snitch had put him in danger: a man named James Williams had told his enslaver, a white butcher named Charles Miller, that Smallwood was about to lead a group to Canada, and Miller had tipped off the Auxiliary Guard. With the guard posted outside, a policeman Smallwood knew personally in the small world of Washington stepped inside. “Thomas,” he said, “I have been instructed in consequence of information that you intend starting for Canada with some slaves to come and search your house.”
Most of the ten or twelve people gathered in Smallwood’s house had apparently not yet been missed by their enslavers; they were able to meet by taking advantage of the limited freedom of movement often permitted people in urban bondage. But one woman was in particular jeopardy, probably because she had been officially reported missing and presumed to have run away. “To get her out of the house unperceived was a matter of great importance,” he wrote. As the policeman searched the house and Goddard and his crew kept watch outside, several of the women present somehow contrived to spirit her away. “That was speedily accomplished by some females, who took her through a back door into the garden, and concealed her in some corn.” Even in the city, it seems, a backyard corn patch big enough to conceal a runaway was nothing unusual.
After the third search of the house, Smallwood recalled, “the blackguard Goddard came in and said, ‘Smallwood, I understand you are going off to Canada and intend to take slaves with you.’ He then proceeded to examine those in the house as to whether they were chattels or free negroes.” But Goddard could not prove they were planning an escape and did not detain them. In fact, Smallwood later wrote with sardonic wit, the group had been “preparing to leave for Canada the next morning, and take a final leave of such beautiful scenes of republican freedom.”
* * *
After this brush with disaster, Smallwood rescheduled his family’s departure for October 3, 1843. But before they left Washington, there was some crucial paperwork to obtain, and Smallwood called on John Ferguson one more time. Ferguson, who a year earlier had signed the paper confirming Smallwood’s manumission, once again went to the Washington courthouse, this time completing a Certificate of Freedom for the rest of the family—on the very day of their departure. “John B. Ferguson swears,” said the document, “that Elizabeth Smallwood, who is about thirty-five years old, and her five children, Thomas Smallwood, who is about twelve, Catharine Smallwood, who is about ten, Susan Smallwood, who is about six, and William Smallwood, who is about five, and Celestine Smallwood, who is about one month old, were all born free.”
Why had they chosen to collect the freedom certificate in the last hours before their departure? Was it a result of last-minute jitters, since Smallwood seems to have planned to depart without a freedom certificate until the visit from Goddard and the Auxiliary Guard? Perhaps, but any free African American traveling interstate knew it was critical to be able to prove one’s freedom, especially on trains and ships.
Was it a mere matter of calendar, finding a time when Ferguson and the Smallwoods could meet at the courthouse? Did Ferguson procrastinate until the Smallwoods told him he could put off the paperwork no longer? Whatever the reason, they completed the courthouse visit, said goodbye to Ferguson, the reluctant enslaver who had played such an essential role in Smallwood’s life, and headed for the wharves, where the steamship Columbia waited to take the family to Baltimore. The plan was for Elizabeth and the children to stay there and wait for Thomas, who would sell off the furniture in their Washington home and take the train north to meet them the next day.
But complications for Smallwood seemed to be multiplying—he couldn’t even walk to the Potomac wharves without running into more trouble. On the way, he was “assailed” by two constables and a white man named Kennedy, whose ostensible purpose was to collect a debt of twenty-nine dollars incurred by Smallwood to bail a man out of jail. The note was not due for some time, but Smallwood decided to pay it off anyway to avoid trouble with the constables. He knew Kennedy posed a much larger danger: a relative of Smallwood’s old betrayer George Lee lived with Kennedy, and Lee had revealed all he knew of Smallwood’s operation to the relative, who Smallwood assumed had repeated it to Kennedy. Indeed, Kennedy urged the constables to arrest Smallwood, but they balked, saying they had no warrant for his arrest.
Smallwood saw his family off on the steamship but abandoned his plan to return home to sell off the furnishings, afraid that the police might now get a warrant and hunt him down. Nor did he dare take the train, or “the cars” in 1840s language, north to meet his family the next day, as he had planned.
“I doubted not that the constables were looking out for me; they doubtless having had knowledge of my original design to take the cars that morning,” he wrote. Instead, after hiding out in Washington for the rest of the day and evening, he rose at 4 a.m., when the night watch went off duty but before the town awoke, and took off on foot “on a by-road for Baltimore,” a trek of some forty miles. Thirteen hours later, at 5 p.m., he finally reached his wife and children in Baltimore, to the relief of Elizabeth, who had “undergone much uneasiness” when her husband did not arrive on the train as planned.
Here we get a rare and revealing glimpse of Elizabeth Anderson Smallwood, the laundress from Virginia who by Smallwood’s account had continually assisted him in organizing escapes. In Baltimore, Elizabeth Smallwood learned that the paranoia of slaveholders had created a new obstacle for free African Americans traveling north. Previously, freedom papers like the ones she and her children had gotten from the courthouse in Washington were sufficient for most free Black travelers to board a train, steamboat, or stagecoach heading north. But some enslaved people had managed to make their escape using forged papers, and their enslavers had sued the railroad, boat, and stagecoach companies, demanding compensation for their losses. As a result, the railroad had added an onerous requirement for free Black passengers—that they “procure a responsible person or persons to enter bond to the amount of the value of the person or persons wishing to procure a passage,” as Smallwood explained.
During her anxious day of waiting for her husband, while having to feed and look after five children aged one month to twelve years, Elizabeth somehow managed to find a generous Baltimorean named Pittman—evidently Edward Pittman, who had a dry-goods business—willing to post bond in the amount of $2,000, an enormous sum that was the estimated value on the slave market of the seven members of the Smallwood family. Thomas Smallwood, who generally wrote little of his wife, made a point of praising her ingenuity on this occasion, writing that Elizabeth “had sufficient presence of mind to make arrangements to remove the only obstacle that lay in the way of our obtaining a speedy passage out of Baltimore.”
They left Baltimore at 7 p.m. on a Thursday, and by noon on Saturday they were in Albany, for so long the northern hub of the escape network that Smallwood had constructed, where they were warmly welcomed by local activists.
“I shall ever hold in grateful remembrance, especially Messrs. Croker, Thomson and Latimore, of Albany, N.Y. I mention these, because of their unbounded benevolence to fugitives, falling in their way,” Smallwood wrote.
From those three or from others whom Smallwood called “bright stars of benevolence” in Albany, he got offers to help him make a new home in the city. But Smallwood had now spent years urging people fleeing slavery not to stop until they reached Canada, and even if he and his family were not in danger from slave catchers, he took his own advice:
Notwithstanding their kind offers to assist me in business, I declined to settle there. I pushed on for Canada, and arrived at Toronto, October 14, 1843, and settled in it, and I have never regretted one moment for having carried out my first intention, which was, inasmuch as I had to leave the metropolis of the United States, to seek freedom, from whose legislative halls freedom is proclaimed to all the world, except to the African race, I would seek it in no part of that inconsistent nation, because I was aware that there was no freedom for a colored person within its limits.
