Kidnapping

Slavery

The human trafficking of Africans from the continent's Slave Coast and of persons of African [Page 955]descent from the Caribbean to North American port cities was outlawed in 1808, but continued as part of a revitalized domestic slave trade anchored in the southern United States. At the same time, northern states such as Pennsylvania passed gradual emancipation laws in the years after the American Revolution, but their growing free black communities remained vulnerable to kidnapping. Free black adults and children were lucrative targets for criminal gangs determined to profit from their illegal sale into slavery as new cotton areas were developing in southern states such as Mississippi and Texas. Early abolitionist and antislavery societies successfully lobbied for antikidnapping statutes in several states, including New York, but local police were often reluctant to ensure effective enforcement, so African American community leaders and white allies organized vigilante societies and sometimes used force to rescue kidnapping victims. In other cases, they relied on the courts.

During the antebellum years, kidnapping of free and fugitive black Americans was reported regularly in the abolitionist press. One of the more famous cases was that of Solomon Northup, who was seized in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and sold in New Orleans, and eventually rescued in 1853, as recounted in Northup's Twelve Years A Slave (1853). However, some kidnap cases were more complex than simply white-on-black abductions. For example, in December 1837, John and Sophia Robinson, a free black couple from Boston, were convicted of kidnapping 5-year-old Elizabeth Bright from outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lived with her white guardian, Henry Bright. Formerly a slaveholder from Alabama, Bright had recently emancipated his slaves and moved to his home state of Massachusetts, along with his wife and the orphaned Elizabeth. Doubt over the sincerity of Bright's promise to raise Elizabeth as a free person seems to have motivated the Robinsons (who were linked to the black Garrisonian section of the abolitionist movement in 1830s Boston).

Carol Wilson identified around 100 kidnappings of free blacks between 1830 and 1861. Although the number of cases declined in the 1840s, the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) offered kidnappers some legal protections as state legislatures were obliged to ensure the return of escaped slaves to their masters, but those who assisted runaway slaves were subject to criminal sanctions. Free black communities in the border states of Maryland and Delaware remained particularly vulnerable.

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