Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Read Online Free PDF

schemes to evade their pursuers. In 1848 an elderly gentleman named William Johnson, his head wrapped in a bandage and his right arm in a sling, boarded a train in Georgia with a male slave to seek medical treatment in the North. In fact, they were both slaves; William Johnson was a frail, light-skinned woman named Ellen Craft, and her manservant was her real-life husband. They made their way to Pennsylvania and then Great Britain, which had abolished slavery in 1833. After the Civil War they returned to the States and founded a school for young African American children in Georgia, not far from their master’s old plantation.
    On March 29, 1849, Henry “Box” Brown famously shipped himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia, barely surviving the twenty-two-hour ordeal.
    John Fairfield, a white man born into a slaveholding family, became a staunch abolitionist renowned for his creative tactics. He once dressed as an undertaker and conspired with more than two dozen slaves, all posing as mourners carrying a corpse (who was very much alive), to embark on a “funeral march” to freedom.
    And in the early-morning hours of May 13, 1862, a twenty-three-year-old South Carolina slave named Robert Smalls boarded a Confederate gunship,
Planter
, docked outside the Charleston quarters of General Roswell Ripley while the general and his crew slept onshore. Smalls had served as the ship’s deckhand and was able to fool the Confederate sentinels along the coast by blowing the correct whistle signals at every station. After sighting the USS
Speed
, which almost fired on him, Smalls raised a white flag and proudly “surrendered” the
Planter
to the Union vessel. Smalls was hailed as a national hero, earned the rank of captain in the U.S. Navy, and was elected to Congress after the war.
    Although Judge’s flight from Philadelphia wasn’t as harrowing or elaborate as other escapes, by remaining in New Hampshire she was publicly defying the most powerful and admired man in the country. Her master had won the War of Independence, helped craft the Constitution, and, among many other legislative acts, signed the fugitiveslave law into effect inside the very house from which she had run away.
    Ona Judge’s master was the president of the United States, George Washington.
    As a dower slave, Judge legally belonged to Washington’s wife, Martha, but the president was for all intents and purposes her owner as well, and he was adamant that she be returned to him. The situation, though, had to be handled delicately.
    “Enclosed is the name, and description of the Girl I mentioned to you last night,” President Washington wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott on September 1, 1796. “She has been the particular attendant on Mrs. Washington since she was ten years old; and was handy and useful to her being perfect Mistress of her needle.”
    Having heard through the political grapevine that Ona was in Portsmouth, Washington asked Wolcott to enlist the aid of New Hampshire’s collector of customs, Joseph Whipple, whose brother William had signed the Declaration of Independence.
    “What will be the best method to [retrieve her], is difficult for me to say,” Washington continued in his confidential letter to Wolcott:
    To seize, and put her on board a Vessel bound immediately to this place, or to Alexandria which I should like better, seems at first view, to be the safest and leas[t] expensive [option].…
    I am sorry to give you, or anyone else trouble on such a trifling occasion, but the ingratitude of the girl, who was brought up and treated more like a child than a Servant (and Mrs. Washington’s desire to recover her) ought not to escape with impunity if it can be avoided.
    Joseph Whipple was eager to please the president and, under the pretext of offering Judge employment, convinced her to meet with him. After talking with the young woman at length, however, he becamegenuinely moved by her desire to be free. She