Table Of Content“Principally Children”: Kidnapping,
Child Trafficking, and the Mission of
Early National Antislavery Activism
Richard Bell
One evening in June 1825, somewhere near Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a man
calling himself John Smith approached an African American boy named Peter Hook
and offered him a drink. The child accepted the offer and followed Smith a few blocks
“down to a schooner near Arch-street wharf to get a dram.” Once they climbed aboard,
a wiry accomplice drew a long knife and pushed young Hook to the floor. “If you holloo
g—d d—n you, I’ll kill you,” he hissed as he ran the blade slowly across the boy’s throat.
Hook swallowed his screams as the two men grabbed him, tied his hands, and forced
him belowdecks to lock him to a pump.1
Hours passed, each second marked by Hook’s terror and uncertainty. The hatch opened
again, and the men shoved two more boys down into the hold. Evening turned slowly to
night and then to morning. The hatch opened a third time and Smith and his associate
stuffed another pair of lads down the wooden ladder and shackled them to the others.
Eventually, this floating prison set sail, slinking away from Philadelphia and making land
a day or so later somewhere on the Delaware coast. The boys’ captors then drove them in
a light two-wheeled carriage to a house deep in the peninsula’s sequestered interior. They
would remain there for several weeks, chained to a thick iron staple behind a heavy door
in an attic room.2
Every few days, a new consignment of African American children arrived to join them,
all of them from Philadelphia. Like Peter Hook, most had been tricked, lured aboard an
unfamiliar ship by a stranger offering them drink or food or a few pennies to help unload
some of its cargo. Soon there were a dozen boys up there in the attic, as well as two girls.
After an interminable incarceration their captors loaded them all into a large wagon. It
took them to a second ship, which carried them across Chesapeake Bay. Then they made
these children, none older than sixteen, walk across the country—from Maryland to
Virginia to North Carolina to South Carolina to Georgia and onward. That walk took
months. Their abductors forbid them to talk to anyone they met and whipped them for
Richard Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. The author wishes to thank Monica Lewis, Ana
Lucia Araujo, the anonymous reviewers for JAH, and the participants in the Slavery, Memory, and African Diaspo
ras seminar at Howard University.
Readers may contact Bell at [email protected].
1 “More Kidnapping,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, Feb. 24, 1827. Peter Hook’s age is unknown, though
his memory for names and places, amply evidenced in later testimony, suggests he was likely older than 12.
2 Ibid.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaacll6
© The Author 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
46 The Journal of American History June 2022
Kidnapping, Child Trafficking, and Antislavery Activism 47
even whispering among themselves about their past lives in freedom. As they trudged
southward and westward, their captors sold these children off in ones and twos in furtive
all-cash deals. Peter Hook became the property of a planter named Perryman who was
setting up in the cotton business in Pike County, Mississippi. Perryman paid $450 for
Hook’s life and labor.3
The traffickers responsible for this unfolding nightmare had done this before and would
do it again. That summer alone members of this kidnapping crew had made four trips
like this one, carrying into slavery “at least 20 free colored persons, principally children.”4
This essay shines a spotlight on the experiences of those children and many others like
them and reconstructs their transformative effect upon the mission of the early national
antislavery movement. It marks the final product of a decade of research and writing
about child trafficking in the early United States, offering up arguments that I could
not adequately explore in Stolen (2019), a recent plot-driven, trade book aimed at general
readers. Specifically, this essay demonstrates that demand for malleable and submissive
young laborers in the cotton kingdom quickly rising along the nation’s southwest bor
der in the three decades following the end of the War of 1812 was robust and sustained
and that, in order to participate in and profit from that lucrative market, gangs of child
snatchers turned the early republic’s northern towns and cities into their hunting grounds.
It argues that these criminal traffickers custom designed abduction techniques to be ef
fective against individual children between six and sixteen years old. It establishes that
the young age of the many thousands of minors ensnared by such means informed their
experiences of enslavement and shaped their opportunities for resistance. The essay then
proceeds to examine antislavery activists’ practical and polemical responses to the rise of
this covert traffick in kidnapped free children. It interrogates the decision of these activ
ists to focus, often fetishistically, on the exquisite sufferings of these boys and girls and of
the parents from whom they were stolen and separated. It contends that such strategies
were market tested, mature, and ubiquitous long before activists mounted second-wave
print campaigns in response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 185O.5
These several interlocking arguments draw from burgeoning new streams of scholar
ship not only on the histories of legal slave trading and illegal trafficking in the early Unit
ed States but also on childhood and the African American experience. Scholarly work on
Black freedom and citizenship in the early nineteenth century has a distinguished lineage
stretching from Leon F. Litwack to Leslie M. Harris and Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Yet
research on African American childhood in northern towns and cities has only recently
begun to flower. The same goes for the history of children in slavery. Childhood as a criti
cal and distinctive stage of enslaved life long escaped notice, even as historians lavished
attention on adjacent subjects, notably family life, courtship, marriage, parenting, and
family dynamics in slavery.6
3 Ibid.
4 “Kidnapping,” Boston Spectator and Ladies' Album, Feb. 3, 1827.
5 Richard Bell, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home (New York,
2019).
6 Leon F. Litwack, North ofSlavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790—1860 (Chicago, 1961); Leslie M. Harris,
In the Shadow ofSlavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626—1863 (Chicago, 2003); Erica Armstrong Dun
bar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, 2008). New
48 The Journal of American History June 2022
The surviving sources, of course, do not favor such inquiries. Youth literacy among
African Americans, both enslaved and free, was such that precious few accounts of lived
experience were authored by children themselves. Instead, most testimonials that illumi
nate the lives of African American children before the Civil War were written by adults—
either contemporary white witnesses or Black memoirists such as John Marram, Mary
Prince, and Frederick Douglass, who relied on decades-old memories to reconstruct their
childhoods after the fact. Investigations of enslaved childhood also face conceptual hur
dles. As Cecily Jones observed in 2007, child agency is “a particularly slippery concept”
and a child’s independent intentionality and individual autonomy under slavery is diffi
cult to parse against the effects of adult encouragement or coercion.7
Borrowing methodological insights from scholars studying childhood in other con
texts, a small vanguard of historians of American slavery has begun to tackle these chal
lenges. Foundational monographs by Wilma King in 1995 and Marie Jenkins Schwartz
in 2000 have been supplemented with work by Daina Ramey Berry, Heather Andrea Wil
liams, Sharia M. Fett, Benjamin N. Lawrance, and several others. Together these works
have illuminated the particularities of enslaved children’s experiences during this critical
life stage—formative years during which, Jones argues, “young people were inculcated
with the racialized ideologies of the wider social order, gained insight into the value sys
tems of their society, were socialized into acceptance of their status as unfree people, and
prepared for their future role as laborers.” We are also now finally beginning to under
stand the active roles that enslaved people played in the construction of their own life
paths, not only on the Middle Passage from Africa to America but also in southern slave
labor camps from Maryland to Mississippi. Yet much work remains, and the present essay
brings this agenda to bear upon the growing population of free children living in the early
national United States who were abducted and trafficked into southern slavery.8
Colored Children for the Southern Market
Kidnapping gangs rose to prominence in the thirty years after the War of 1812 to cater
to the insatiable appetite for Black labor along the Gulf Coast. The white settlers swarm
ing into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in those decades demanded a bottomless
supply of forced labor to pick cotton and cut sugarcane and would buy almost anyone—
work in this field includes Crystal L. Webster, “Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: Northern African American
Children’s Cultural and Political Resistance, 1780—1861” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2017).
7 Cecily Jones, “‘If This Be Living I’d Rather Be Dead’: Enslaved Youth, Agency, and Resistance on an Eigh
teenth-Century Jamaican Estate,” History of the Family, 12 (no. 2, 2007), 92, 95. On Works Progress Administra
tion narratives as sources for the study of enslaved children, see Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “‘Remember, Dear, when the
Yankees came through here, I was only ten years old’: Valuing the Enslaved Child of the wpa Slave Narratives,” in
Child Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies, ed. Anna Mae Duane
(New York, 2017), 27-49.
8Jones, “‘IfThis Be Living I’d Rather Be Dead,”’ 92; Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-
Century America (Bloomington, 1995); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the An
tebellum South (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the
Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston, 2017); Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to
Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill, 2012); Sharia M. Fett, Recap
tured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (Chapel Hill,
2017); Benjamin N. Lawrance, Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (New Ha
ven, 2014). For a recent state-of-the-field survey of childhood studies, see Anna Mae Duane, ed., The Childrens
Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens, Ga., 2013). Scholars of this era generally regard childhood as
the years prior to the seventeenth birthday. Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedoms Child: Black Children and Visions
of the Future after Slavery (New York, 2008), 8.
Kidnapping, Child Trafficking, and Antislavery Activism 49
including children. Yet in 1808, federal lawmakers had moved to limit the legal supply
by outlawing any further imports of enslaved people from overseas. Buying foreign-born
workers became harder and more expensive, forcing cotton and sugar growers to look to
domestic sources for their labor needs.9
The most obvious result was the rise of a slave trade wholly within the borders of the
United States. After 1808, interstate slave traders tried to meet southwestern settlers’ de
mands by supplying them with thousands of American-born laborers each year bought
lawfully in states such as Maryland and Virginia. This became big business, and by 1860,
enslavers had forcibly relocated roughly 1 million Black people from the Chesapeake to
the Gulf of Mexico. But settlers across the Deep South always wanted more. This endless
demand made it increasingly attractive and lucrative for anyone sufficiently cold-blooded
to try to illegally seize free children such as Peter Hook from northern cities, launder them
through this legal (and largely overland) supply chain, and then peddle them to buyers in
the vast new southwestern slave market.10
Operatives in these criminal outfits did this work because it could make them an awful
lot of money. Peter Hook’s life and labor sold for $450 (about $ 10,500 today), an amount
that recognized the decades of productive labor that lay ahead of him. A study of mem
oirs written by formerly enslaved people found that 84 percent of the authors had begun
working before their eleventh birthday. In the Deep South, newly established planters
bought young girls to cook, spin, weave, make beds, fill pitchers, take out bedpans, and
to pick cotton—a backbreaking task that required dexterity and stamina but no particular
physical strength. Boys too could do that work, and could also be set to labor felling trees,
clearing brush, and burning debris. No surprise, then, that when Robert Byrd Beverley
moved to Alabama to set up as a cotton planter, he made sure to buy a batch of “boys, 10
or 12 years old or 15” to staff his household and tame his thickly forested new acreage.11
For these reasons, both outlaw kidnappers and law-abiding slave traders targeted chil
dren deliberately and persistently. Consider first the legal side of this trade. African Amer
icans under the age of sixteen made up more than 25 percent of all the people lawfully
purchased in the upper South and sold to the lower South in the decades before the Civil
War. When a traveler in 1833 paid a visit to John Armfield’s slave pen in Alexandria, Vir
ginia, for instance, he found that half of the people incarcerated there that day were mi
nors. Out on the roads, coffles frequently comprised more young people than adults, and
many were made up entirely of children. On a visit to Virginia in 1835, William Seward
9 Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, 1989); Walter
Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Steven Deyle, Carry Me
Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005); Damian Alan Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migra
tion in the Antebellum South (New York, 2015); Richard Bell, “The Great Jugular Vein of Slavery: New Histories of
the Domestic Slave Trade,” History Compass, 11 (Dec. 2013), 1150—64.
10Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 12. On the rise of this reverse Underground Railroad, see Bell, Stolen; Carol
Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780—1865 (Lexington, Ky., 1995); and Julie
Winch, “Philadelphia and the Other Underground Railroad,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 111
(Jan. 1987), 3-25.
11 Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 157—58; Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh, 41, 46, 83; Richard H. Steckel,
“Women, Work, and Health under Plantation Slavery in the United States,” in More than Chattel: Black Women
and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, 1996), 44; Steven F.
Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt,
1815—1840,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip
D. Morgan (Charlottesville, 1993), 156—62; Laurence J. Kotlikoff, “The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans,
1804 to 1862,” Economic Lnquiry, 17 (Oct. 1979), 510; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 143; Williams, Help Me to
Find My People, 34—35.
50 The Journal of American History June 2022
came across one such convoy, a small posse of “ten naked little boys, between six and
twelve years old, tied together, two and two, by their wrists,... all fastened to a long rope,
and followed by a tall, gaunt white man” who drove them ever forward.12
Kidnappers of free people sold to many of the same buyers as did legal slave traders
such as Armfield and exhibited the same appetite to acquire children to sell. An activist in
Philadelphia observed a spike in disappearances of African American boys and girls from
the city as early as 1803. Disruptions caused by the War of 1812 briefly put a brake on the
traffick, but it resumed and accelerated thereafter. In 1819a constable serving a warrant
was able to search a Delaware gang’s safe house, where, inside a locked room, he found
“four small coloured girls.” In a hut outside were three more “small coloured girls, and a
boy or two,” while in a garret upstairs he discovered five young women, “from eighteen
to twenty years of age ... all in irons and strongly bound together by heavy chains.”13
Because kidnapping was illegal, assessments of the number of free Black children and
adults forced to ride this reverse Underground Railroad in the thirty years after 1815 are
necessarily speculative. In 1836 David Ruggles, an activist who devoted his life to anti
kidnapping work, told newspaper readers that as many as five hundred Black New York
ers lost their liberty this way every year. As estimated in 1903 by the historian Winfield
Collins, across all of the so-called free states, the volume of abductions ranged “from a few
hundred to two or three thousand annually.” Collins found the scale of seizures to be stag
gering and was “quite certain that [when measured over decades] as many were kidnapped
as escaped from bondage, if not more.” Given the illicit nature of this business, such
claims can never be satisfactorily corroborated. Yet surviving sources make it resound
ingly clear that kidnappers preyed on free African Americans wherever they found them.14
The success of the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave (2013), which drew attention
to Solomon Northup’s experiences of enslavement and human trafficking, has left the
impression that men like him were the typical targets. That was not the case. Northup
was actually an outlier. Kidnappers rarely approached highly literate, middle-aged adults.
They preferred instead to lure away poorly educated boys and girls with ruses that could
swiftly separate them from their families. Some gangs, such as the one that ensnared
12 Frederick W. Seward, Autobiography of William H. Seward, from 1801 to 1834, with a Memoir of His Life, and
Selections from His Letters from 1831 to 1846 (New York, 1877), 271; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 45, 76, 133,
141; Deyle, Carry Me Back, 247—48; Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh, 41; Donald M. Sweig, “Reassessing the
Human Dimension of the Interstate Slave Trade,” Prologue, 12 (Spring 1980), 11; Joshua D. Rothman, The Ledger
and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (New York, 2021), 121; E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence
and Tour in the United States of North America, from April, 1833, to October, 1834 (2 vols., 1835; New York, 1969),
II, 179. For examples of legal slave traders in the upper South announcing their interest in buying children, see
“Cash for Negroes,” Virginia Herald, April 19, 1826; and “400 Negroes Wanted,” Frederick (md) Herald, Nov. 24,
1832. For references to children in coffles in contemporary travel narratives, see Robert Sutcliff, Travels in Some Parts
of North America, Tn the Years 1804, 1805, & 1806 (York, 1815), 107—8, 207; G. W. Featherstonhaugh, Excursion
Through the Slave States (1844; New York, 1968), 122; John Palmer, Journals of Travels in the United States of North
America, and in Lower Canada, Performed in the Year 1817 (London, 1818), 142—43; James Silk Buckingham, The
Eastern andWestern States of America (3 vols., London, 1842), I, 254; and John Melish, Travels in the United States of
America, in the Years 1806& 1807, and 1809, 1810, & 1811 (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1812), II, 94—95.
13 “Minute Book of the Acting Committee, 1800—1824” (microfilm: reel 1), Nov. 30, 1819, Pennsylvania Abo
lition Society Papers, 1748—1979 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia); Humanitas, Reflections Upon
Slavery, with Recent Evidence of Its Inhumanity Occasioned by the Melancholy Death of Romain, a French Negro (Phila
delphia, 1803), 18.
14 Winfield H. Collins, The Domestic Slave Trade of the Southern States (1903; New York, 1904), 94; “Look Out
for Kidnappers!!,” Zions Watchman, Aug. 3, 1836. For an interrogation of the term reverse Underground Railroad,
see Richard Bell, “Counterfeit Kin: Kidnappers of Color, the Reverse Underground Railroad, and the Origins of
Practical Abolition,” Journal of the Early Republic, 38 (Summer 2018), 199—230.
Kidnapping, Child Trafficking, and Antislavery Activism 51
Peter Hook in 1825, appeared to specialize in child trafficking. Sadly, what happened to
Hook happened over and over again in the early national era. “The stealing of children
is frequent. We have accounts of numerous cases,” Benjamin Lundy told readers of his
newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, in 1826. For years, the meeting agendas
of fledgling first-wave antislavery societies were consumed by child-snatching cases, and
throughout the 1820s activist commentators across the northern states regularly decried
the terrifying frequency by which “a great number of free born children” were abducted.
“ Beware of kidnappers . . . stealing colored children for the Southern market,” one Man
hattan journalist warned in 1829.15
Over the next ten years, planters’ demands for Black children climbed ever higher,
the product of the opening of Texas to American settlers and of rising fears about the
militancy of enslaved adults after the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion. In response, kidnappers
expanded operations. This escalation made their activities more visible than ever—even
foreign visitors to the United States could not help but mark it. During a brief stay in
Washington, D.C., in 1833, British traveler Edward Abdy wrote in his journal that many
of the boys and girls he saw buzzing about that city looking for work or visiting with
friends “are liable to be carried off by these land-sharks.” So great was the surge that Da
vid Ruggles, the free Black activist, complained in 1837 that he could no longer keep his
own ledgers of missing Manhattan children up to date because he did not have the time
or room “to record the twentieth part of the cases which have come to our notice through
various channels.”16
The Particular Marks of a Black Child
The land sharks who targeted free children for the purposes of abducting and enslaving
them found urban centers appealingly well stocked. Large port cities such as New York
and Philadelphia teemed with youngsters. Black boys, in particular, often spent their
days out on the streets. Few spots were available in schools willing to admit them, and
work for those who needed it was hard to come by. While some free Black girls labored as
domestics, their parents struggled mightily to find positions for their sons. Those who did
land jobs found themselves confined to dirty, difficult, or degrading work in brickyards
and lumberyards or as chimney sweeps. No other white employers would have them. As
one resident of Philadelphia explained in 1830, “if a man of color has children, it is al
most impossible for him to get a trade for them, as the journeymen and apprentices gen
erally refuse to work with them, even if the master is willing, which is seldom the case.”17
1512 Years a Slave, dir. Steve McQueen (Regency Enterprises, River Road Entertainment, Plan B, New Regency,
and Film4, 2013); Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen ofNew-York,
Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Auburn, 1853). “Kidnapping,” Genius of Universal
Emancipation, March 25, 1826; “Mayors Office,” Natchez (ms) Ariel, March 2, 1827; Lydia Maria Child, An Ap
peal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston, 1833), 65. Emphasis in original. One survey of the
minute books of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s Acting Committee counted more than 300 kidnapping case
files. See Sharon Braslaw Sundue, “Child Trafficking in the Wake of Emancipation in Early National Pennsylvania,
1784—1820,” unpublished paper, 2012, p. 4 (in Richard Bell’s possession).
16 Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, II, 91; “Annals of Kidnapping
and Slave-Trading in Our Free States,” National Enquirer and Constitutional Advocate of Universal Liberty, Jan. 14,
1837; Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
(New York, 2020).
17 “To the Editor,” Liberator, Feb. 12, 1831; Bell, Stolen, 23—31; Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebel
lum Philadelphia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn, and Socioeconomic Decline,” Journal of Social History, 5 (Winter
52 The Journal of American History June 2022
Finding no place in school or in the labor market, many Black boys from poorer fami
lies idled on street corners and in alleys and courts. Flying kites, throwing snowballs or
stones, lighting off firecrackers, or swimming in the river, they were a very visible pres
ence in the urban landscape. Complaints submitted to mayors’ offices in these years make
clear that white residents regarded these corner kids as boisterous nuisances. Marginal
ized, underemployed, and eager—often desperate—for money, these young people were
extremely and dangerously susceptible.18
Professional kidnappers exploited these vulnerabilities any way they could, developing
a broad array of abduction techniques purpose-built to entrap children. As David Ruggles
explained to New Yorkers in 1837, “this business is carried on systematically, sometimes
by actually stealing and carrying them away, sometimes by claiming them as slaves, and
no opportunity given them to prove the contrary. Others are enticed away, and taken to
the south under various pretexts and there sold.” Strikingly, these child snatchers used
brute force sparingly, leaning instead upon the threat of violence only when needed. They
evidently found children such as Peter Hook easy to gull and hoodwink, to terrorize,
and to terrify into submission. Reports of adults kidnapped and then enslaved described
men and women being “seized,” “dragged,” and “carried off.” However, contemporary ac
counts detailing the disappearances of boys and girls typically noted that they had been
“seduced,” “allured,” “persuaded,” or “decoyed away.”19 20
To do so successfully required a good deal of planning and cunning, and child kid
nappers were noted for their “ingenuity and stratagems.” They would hire their marks to
go with them on spurious errands. They would sidle up to their targets with the promise
of a few pennies or “a piece of ginger-bread” and then lead them away by the hand. As
a result, it sometimes seemed as if children simply vanished from street corners, water
pumps, and stoops with no struggle or commotion. Henny, “a small colored girl” just six
years old, went out to the store to buy yeast in the summer of 1835 but did not return.
Another child wandered away from his mother during a trip to the market and was never
seen agai• n.20
1971), 183—209; Janet Harrison Shannon, “African-American Childhood in Early Philadelphia,” in Multicultural
ism: Roots and Realities, ed. C. James Trotman (Bloomington, 2002), 189—97; Elise Kammerer, “To Uplift Their
Race: Free Black Education and Antislavery Activity in Early National Philadelphia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Co
logne, 2016); Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800—1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago,
1981), 152—73. Census takers found that 1 in 3 African American residents of Philadelphia in 1820 was under the
age of 14. That was likely an undercount. Ibid., 256.
18 Concerned Citizens to Joseph Watson, Jan. 8, 1825, item 79, folder 12, box 1, Joseph Watson Papers, 1823—
1828 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early
Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009), 168.
19 “Annals of Kidnapping and Slave Trading in our Free States.” For the quoted descriptors of kidnappings, see
Jesse Torrey Jr., A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, in the United States:. . . Including Memoirs of Facts on the Interior
Traffic in Slaves, and on Kidnapping (1817; Ballston Spa, 1818), 85; “Kidnapping,” Relfs Philadelphia Gazette, July
5, 1818; “Horrors of Slavery,” Genius of Universal Emancipation (Aug. 1831); “Boy Lost,” Poulsons American Daily
Advertiser, Aug. 13, 1825; William McMann to Enoch Lewis, July 18, 1825, Miscellaneous Papers, Meeting for
Sufferings (Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa.); J. Williams, Daniel Mason, and Gal-
laudette Oliver to Watson, Sept. 5, 1824, item 475, folder 8, box 1, Watson Papers; and “Kidnapping,” Genius of
Universal Emancipation, Jan. 21, 1826.
20Torrey, Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, in the United States, 96; Daniel E. Meaders, Kidnappers in Philadelphia:
Isaac Hoppers Tales of Oppression, 1780—1843 (New York, 1994), 41; Ralph Clayton, Cash for Blood: The Baltimore
to New Orleans Slave Trade (Bowie, 2002), 38—45; Leroy Graham, Baltimore: The Nineteenth-Century Black Capital
(Washington, 1982), 60; “A Kidnapper Caught,” Poulsons American Daily Advertiser, Aug. 13, 1818; J. L. Reese to
Watson, March 31, 1827, item 415, folder 19, box 1, Watson Papers; Harris, In the Shadow ofSlavery, 208; J. W.
Loguen, The Reverend J. W Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative ofReal Life (1859; New York, 1969), 12;
“Annals of Kidnapping and Slave Trading in Our Free States”; “Kidnapping,” African Observer: A Monthly Journal,
Kidnapping, Child Trafficking, and Antislavery Activism 53
If gang members could act quickly, they and their prey would be long gone by the time
a family member noticed a child was missing. These parents were typically busy and dis
tracted: mothers employed as laundresses or maids in houses on the other side of town,
fathers often absent for extended periods as they held down jobs on coastal freighters
away for weeks at a time. In fact, unless there were eyewitnesses to the abduction, fami
lies could not immediately be sure that a kidnapper had struck. When four boys vanished
from Philadelphia in August 1825, two months after Peter Hook was carried off, their
loved ones initially suspected simple truancy or perhaps accidental drowning. Such as
sumptions delayed the possibility of intervention, limiting the likelihood of interception
and rescue. By the time Peter Hook’s parents, Betsy and Peter Sr., could confirm their
son’s disappearance, he was already far away.21
As experienced kidnappers understood all too well, the longer these boys and girls were
gone, the harder it was for their families to get them back. Poor parents of color had pre
cious little political leverage, and laws across the Deep South required white men to travel
there to positively identify a suspected victim of criminal trafficking, making the task of
recovery almost impossible. “If the felons can contrive to secret them for a year or two
under a changed name,” a writer in Philadelphia’s African Observer magazine explained in
1827, “their persons and appearance, from hardship, sickness and sufferings, and some
times from rapid growth, become so entirely altered, that [even] their most intimate
friends are puzzled to recognize them.” After a few years’ absence, “but few white persons
can accurately describe the particular marks of a black child, who many have grown up
even under their own roof.”22
Once embarked on the continent-crossing journey to the cotton kingdom, captors de
rived all sorts of other advantages from the youth of their formerly free prisoners. They
usually ate less than adults, ensuring that food budgets stretched further and that carry
ing costs remained low. They were not typically strong enough to twist their irons and
escape their fetters and lacked the know-how to jimmy their locks. They were less likely
as well to have held a knife or a gun before, less likely to try to fight, and less likely to run
away. Even those cofHed children who did take to their heels possessed less geopolitical
literacy than adults and usually could not run fast enough or far enough to outpace their
pursuers. For these reasons, successful escapes were rare. Rare enough, in fact, that when
one kidnapped boy did manage to find his way home his return was so unexpected that it
seemed to his rejoicing family “as though he had risen from the dead.”23
Containing Essays and Documents, 1 (no. 8, 1827), 139—40. To maximize trust and minimize a child’s suspicion,
several trafficking gangs took the extraordinary step of hiring Black or mixed-race operatives to do this risky front
end work. Among them was John Smith, the man who lured away Hook in June 1825. Bell, “Counterfeit Kin,”
199-214.
21 Rockman, Scraping By, 167; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 158—69; “$20 Reward,” United States Gazette,
Nov. 11, 1825; “Kidnapping,” X/ntTZw Observer, 1 (no. 2, 1827), 37; “More Kidnapping,” Geniiis ofUniversal Eman
cipation, Feb. 24, 1827.
22 “Kidnapping,” African Observer, 1 (no. 5, 1827), 38; Winch, “Philadelphia and the Other Underground Rail
road,” 5.
23 Meaders, Kidnappers in Philadelphia, 89; John Komlos and Bjorn Alecke, “The Economics of Antebellum
Slave Heights Reconsidered,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 26 (Winter 1996), 439; “Kidnapping,” Genius of
Universal Emancipation, July 26, 1826; David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against
the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, 2006), 8; Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the
Antebellum South, 39. Coffle drivers intent on sexually assaulting female captives also derived insidious advantage
when their prey were smaller and weaker. Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape,
Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review, 106 (Dec.
2001), 1619-50.
54 The Journal of American History June 2022
At every turn, traffickers found their young captives easier than adults to command
and control. Peter Hook later recalled that he and the other boys and girls in his walk
ing chain gang “were not permitted to talk to any one [we] met.” Children were also
more likely to accept new names and new identifies and to repeat (and perhaps inter
nalize) “any story that [their captors] may think necessary to forge for them.” Nor did
most people Hook’s age possess the literacy necessary to smuggle out hastily scribbled
letters to alert loved ones to their locations. It took Solomon Northup, a literate adult in
his mid-thirties when first enslaved, no less than twelve years to get word of his where
abouts to people back home. It took a boy named William Clark, kidnapped and sold
into slavery in Louisiana, fully nineteen years to gain the skills and opportunity to try to
do the same.24
Kicking against the Side
Age was one of the most important determinants of how coffled Black people experi
enced the early days and weeks of their enslavement. To keep up the pace on this grueling
journey, captors often required children under the age of ten to ride in one of the supply
wagons. While these carts spared them the blisters, joint aches, and lame limbs endured
by everyone else, these transports were bone-jangling, cramped, and often exposed to the
elements. The wagon James Spaulding saw on a southern road in 1816 “had no covering,”
and the “five or six half naked black children . . . tumbled . . . together” on it “seemed to
have been broiled to sleep.” Most young ones trafficked this way were durably oblivious
to their fate. They perceived what was happening only dimly and were surely uncertain
about where exactly they were going, and why. Robert Sutcliff, a British visitor to the
South in the early 1800s, observed that the youngsters he saw on a cart in one convoy of
forced migrants wore “smiles of innocence.” Other juvenile coffle travelers seemed in awe
of the novelty of their journey, registering feelings of “amazement and wonder” as they
wove their way over the Allegheny Mountains or alongside the Mississippi River. Others
still could be spotted “singing, and seemingly quite merry” or “capering and practicing
jokes upon each other.”25
Older children, however, saw their fate with clearer eyes. Years later, one girl could
still recall the “cries and sobs” of the other kidnapped youths who had made the end
less footsore trek southward with her. The cause of their grief was obvious. The “hyenas
in humanshape” who inflicted these miseries made orphans of thousands of boys and
girls, stripping them of the security and protection of their most cherished guardians and
24 “More Kidnapping,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, Feb. 24, 1827; “Kidnapping,” African Observer (no. 5,
1827), 38; Loguen, ReverendJ. U7 Loguen, 16; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 41—42; “Minute Book of the Acting Commit
tee, 1822—1842” (microfilm: reel 5), June 25, 1835, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers. When questioned, the
purchaser of one kidnapped child claimed that the boy, 8-year-old James Dailey, had “never alluded to his freedom.”
Philip Hickey to Watson, June 14, 1827, item 4, folder 1, Joseph Watson Correspondence, 1826—1846 (Louisiana
State University Special Collections, Baton Rouge).
25 Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York, 1839), 76;
Sutcliff, Travels in Some Parts of North America, 207; Featherstonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States, 122;
Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South, 110—11, 120; Palmer, Journals of Travels in the United
States of North America, 142—43; Williams, Help Me to Find My People, 29. Scholars of plantation slavery have noted
that children born into bondage were not usually fully conscious of their own legal status as property or of their
debased status in the wider world until they reached age 10 or 11. The same dynamics surely affected some children
kidnapped into slavery as well. Rachael L. Pasierowska, “Up from Childhood: When African-American Enslaved
Children Learned of Their Servile Status,” Slavery and Abolition, 37 (no. 1, 2016), 94—116.
Kidnapping, Child Trafficking, and Antislavery Activism 55
marooning them instead in a sea of strangers. Kidnapped children, then, often felt most
acutely the alienation and disorientation common to all forced migrants.26
Least equipped to deal with debilitating trauma, they had to care for themselves as
best they could. If evidence from transatlantic slaving voyages is any guide, a handful of
young people on these overland odysseys may have accepted roles as informants in return
for material rewards from their captors. Most, though, did no such thing. Instead, some
simply collapsed into themselves, going to a place where the tears were dry. Describing
his fellow migrant prisoners, one coffle traveler later recalled that “for long and weary days
and nights, not a motion or sound of delight, not a joyous look or laugh, varied their de
pression and wretchedness.” Many more young people turned to the older captives trudg
ing alongside them, seeking them out as proxy parents and surrogate caregivers. Others
did their best to make friends with children their own age.27
As those daily efforts to resist commodification attest, child victims of human traffick
ing were sometimes far less passive and biddable than their kidnappers had assumed. Sev
eral of the young people in Peter Hook’s coffle began accosting other travelers and “saying
we were free,” and earned severe whippings for doing so. While children such as Hook
were far less likely than adults to attempt suicide and were rarely at the center of road
side uprisings, they engaged in a broad range of other oppositional tactics. They walked
slowly and complained of injuries both feigned and real. They demanded more food, bet
ter blankets, and more sleep. Children’s infrapolitical resistance rarely challenged the au
thority of their drivers directly and tended to be modest, episodic, and nonviolent—but
it all added up.28
A close study of eyewitness accounts and first-person testimonies reveal a pattern of pro
test and push back that began at the moment free Black children realized they were being
abducted. They kicked and screamed to resist their removal. Others bit and fought—and
sometimes that was enough. When “a scoundrel attempted to carry off a small negro girl”
one Sunday evening in May 1822, she so “alarmed him by her cries” that he fled. Two
New Jersey bridge workers rescued another bound and gagged child from the back of a
wagon when they heard him “kicking against the side.” Even ships were not wholly secure
or soundproofed, and another captive boy attracted the intervention of dock workers when
they heard him yelling from inside the belly of a schooner tied up at a Philadelphia wharf.29
26 Loguen, Reverend J. Wf Loguen, 13; “Annals of Kidnapping and Slave-Trading in Our Free States”; Bell, Stolen,
81—121; Williams, Help Me to Find My People, 39, 44, 122.
27 Loguen, Reverend J. W Loguen, 14; Erik J. Hofstee, “The Great Divide: Aspects of the Social History of the
Middle Passage in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2001), 92; Pargas, Slav
ery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South, 115, 119—20; John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of
the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (London, 1855), 15—16; Lawrance,
Amistad's Orphans, 5—6; Williams, Help Me to Find My People, 40—42. When coffled adults engaged in rare bouts of
laughter, teasing, clowning, or dancing it was often in attempts to cheer grief-stricken and homesick captive children.
28 “More Kidnapping,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, Feb. 24, 1827; Hofstee, “Great Divide,” 99—100; Ce
cily Jones, “Youthful Rebels: Young People, Agency, and Resistance against Colonial Slavery in the British Carib
bean Plantation World,” in Child Slaves in the Modern World, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C.
Miller (Athens, Ohio, 2011), 64—83. In letters home to their wives, some legal slave traders talked about their own
young offspring with intense affection, as if their consciences were burning new holes in their souls. “Kiss them all
and tell them their papa will soon come home,” Obadiah Fields told his wife, Jane, from the road in 1825. Others,
such as William Long, brought their teenage sons with them to help out in the family business. Obadiah Fields to
Jane M. Fields, Aug. 8, 1825, Obadiah Fields Papers, 1784—1855 (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manu
script Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.); Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 75; Williams, Help Me to Find
My People, 109—10.
29 “Look Out,” Relfs Philadelphia Gazette, May 22, 1822; Samuel May, The Fugitive Slave Law and Tts Victims
(NewYork, 1861), 81; Margaret Hope Bacon, Lambs Warrior: The Life ofTsaac T. Hopper (NewYork, 1970), 2.
