Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home

by Richard Bell

Overview

This “superbly researched and engaging” (The Wall Street Journal) true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice belongs “alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison” (Jane Kamensky, Professor of American History at Harvard University).

Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.

Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.

“Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell’s investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americans” (Booklist).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501169458
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	34,321
File size:	27 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Richard Bell teaches Early American history at the University of Maryland. He has received several teaching prizes and major research fellowships including the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. His first book, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, was published in 2012. He is also the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.

Table of Contents

Introduction The Reverse Underground Railroad 1

Chapter 1 Sanctuary City 11

Chapter 2 Black Hearts 33

Chapter 3 Midnight Land 47

Chapter 4 In-laws and outlaws 63

Chapter 5 The Beaten Way 81

Chapter 6 The body in the Wagon 103

Chapter 7 The Halfway House 123

Chapter 8 The Lifeboat 143

Chapter 9 A Living Witness 163

Chapter 10 Hunting Wolves 183

Chapter 11 Kidnappers All 203

Conclusion The First Law of Nature 223

Acknowledgments 233

Notes 237

Key Sources 295

Index 305

Editorial Reviews

08/01/2019

In 1825, five African American boys were kidnapped in Philadelphia and taken on a journey on the Reverse Underground Railroad that took them as far as Alabama, where they were sold into slavery. Bell (history, Univ. of Maryland) demonstrates that their story was not an unusual one: even in so-called "free" states, African Americans were routinely kidnapped and taken South to feed the insatiable demand for enslaved labor on cotton plantations. Children were especially vulnerable. What is unusual about this case is that the kidnapped boys eventually returned home, thanks to an unlikely partnership between the Philadelphia mayor and an Alabama lawyer. It's a fascinating story, but one in which the voices and experiences of the victims are largely absent. The few primary sources available give only a hint of the details, and Bell frequently resorts to guesses as to what they "probably" or "must have" felt. VERDICT Overall, recommended for readers interested in American history, especially those seeking an understanding of slavery's impact on life throughout the United States.—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

10/07/2019

University of Maryland professor Bell (We Shall Be No More) uncovers the history of the Reverse Underground Railroad in this moving account of five African-American boys kidnapped from Philadelphia and sold into slavery in 1825. According to Bell, “child snatching was frequent, pernicious, and politically significant” in the decades after Congress banned slave imports from Africa and the Caribbean in 1808. After being kidnapped, the boys were forced to make a 1,000-mile trek to the slave markets of Natchez, Miss. Along the way, 10-year-old Cornelius Sinclair was sold to an Alabama cotton planter, and the kidnappers beat another boy to death. In Rocky Springs, Miss., 15-year-old Sam Scomp convinced a plantation owner that he and the others had been abducted, setting into motion a series of legal battles that, Bell argues, culminated in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which “put the country on a collision course with civil war.” Drawing from a wealth of archival materials, Bell paints a harrowing picture of this human trafficking network and the “tens of thousands of free black people” it ensnared. The result is a scholarly work that tells a powerful human interest story. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

’BOY LOST,’ read the advertisement placed in a newspaper by the father of one of the five free boys kidnapped in Philadelphia in 1825. Richard Bell’s heartbreaking and searing account of their story chronicles not only the agonies and atrocities of slavery, but the fragility of freedom, and the dauntlessness of resistance.” - Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

“Opening an unknown world from an unsung tragedy that started in early national Philadelphia and stretched grimly South, Stolen offers a worm’s eye view of the leviathan of American slavery, and of some of its most dastardly perpetrators and its most remarkable survivors. Richard Bell has researched inventively and mastered a vast body of scholarship, as we would expect from so distinguished a historian. But he also imbues his tale with the deep humanity of a great novelist. Both riveting and heartrending, Stolen joins the great literature of America’s founding tragedy, earning a place alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison.” – Jane Kamensky, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University

“Stolen is historical storytelling at its best. Bell makes brilliant detective work come alive with vivid, powerful writing. The saga of these five boys, kidnapped and smuggled from Philadelphia to Mississippi in the 1820s, captures both the powerful undertow of slavery in the free black communities of the North and the urgent dawning of the abolitionist movement. There's been nothing like it since Northup.” —Adam Rothman, author of Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery

“Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell's investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americans.” —Booklist

“A well-told story... A deep dive into the extraordinary risks faced by free blacks in the antebellum era.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A fascinating story.”—Library Journal

"It’s an uncomfortable part of New Orleans’ history, but one that needs to be told. Bell’s story — part thriller, part tragedy, part ode to the resilience of the human spirit — goes a long way to making that history come alive." - The Advocate

In Stolen Richard Bell brings to life amoral con men, heartless slave dealers and suffering
victims. He vividly re-creates the squalid social environments of interstate human trafficking.
His superbly researched and engaging book exposes previously hidden horrors of American
slavery. - The Wall Street Journal

"Meticulously researched...Stolen is a remarkable narrative, in part, because of how Bell manages to clearly relate the complex politics of the time without ever legitimizing the choices made by those who bought and sold human lives." -NPR

From the Publisher

2019-07-15
A historian tells the harrowing story of five free black boys kidnapped in Philadelphia by a brutal gang who hoped to sell them into slavery.

After the United States outlawed the importing of slaves in 1808, black residents of free states like Pennsylvania lived in dread of kidnappers who hoped to sell them in the labor-deprived South. Bell (Early American History/Univ. of Maryland; We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, 2012) brings their terrors to life as he reconstructs this little-known episode in American history. The author focuses on five boys lured onto a ship on the Philadelphia waterfront in 1825 by a criminal gang led by Joseph Johnson, whose accomplices included his brother and sister-in-law, Ebenezer and Sally Johnson. Newlyweds Ebenezer and Sally took the boys on a horrific journey by foot and wagon toward the slave market in Natchez, Mississippi, that soon went awry. Ebenezer sold one boy in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, when cash ran low and beat another so savagely he died on the trip. The three remaining boys, desperate but alert, caught a break when one ran away and told his story to a sympathetic Mississippi cotton planter. That encounter set in motion near-miraculous events involving heroic acts by the planter and his lawyer and Joseph Watson, the mayor of Philadelphia, all determined to return the boys to the city and to freedom. Tapping rich archival sources, Bell overreaches only when he strains to portray criminals like the Johnson gang as a "Reverse Underground Railroad," drawing oversimplified parallels between people like Harriet Tubman, a "conductor" on that storied network, and murderous thugs like Ebenezer, whom he casts as "a conductor" on its evil twin. His book—more comprehensive than Solomon Northup's memoir of his own kidnapping, Twelve Years a Slave—needed no such distracting comparisons to deserve wide attention. Ultimately, Bell offers a well-told story of brave, abducted boys—and the equally brave adults who fought for them—slightly undercut by its aggressive casting of Underground Railroad workers and kidnappers of free blacks as mirror images of one another.

A deep dive into the extraordinary risks faced by free blacks in the antebellum era.

Kirkus Reviews