Fugitive Slaves Runaways

As slavery expanded throughout the antebellum South, slaveholders experienced a growing phenomenon of slaves running away. Fugitive slaves were slaves who escaped their owner and left without authorization, commonly heading north towards the free states and Canada. Fugitive slaves and their experiences were diverse from their motivations to their characteristics. No single fugitive faced the same challenges and there was not set way to face these challenges, although there were common ways of doing so. This essay will examine the trends in the experiences of fugitive slaves, arguing that most fugitive slaves were young males without a family who were motivated by inhumane treatment, being sold away, and the hope of freedom to run away and overcome …show more content…
Fugitive slaves came from a multitude of backgrounds. They could be skilled, unskilled, urban, rural, female, male, young, or old. Runaway slave advertisements described a range of types. There were trends in urban slaves running away because they had access to more resources and were in contact with the free black community and abolitionists. Also, many women ran away even if they had children they had to bring along such as Margaret Garner. No one set type of slave was a runaway; instead, all types of slaves were motivated to journey to …show more content…
Even those who escaped from Maryland usually had to travel miles to get to safety. Those in the Deep South had a more difficult time trying to travel north. Some runaways decided to use various forms of transportation to improve their chances of not being caught. In a few cases, slaves have stolen carriages so that large groups made up of the children or the elderly could travel north. Other slaves used boats to travel along or across waterways like the Mississippi River and the Ohio River. William Chaplin, an abolitionist, hired Daniel Drayton to take a fugitive family north from Washington D.C. on his schooner The Pearl. A similar case occurred when Jonathan Walker, a Boston sea captain, attempted to take seven slaves to the Bahamas on his ship. It was more common for slaves to cross the Ohio on a boat along their journey than it was to actually take a ship on the ocean. Trains also became a way for slaves from the Deep South to travel north without having to walk hundreds of miles. William and Ellen Craft are one of the most noted examples of fugitives traveling by train. Knowing the journey from Macon, Georgia to the north would be too long, they decided on taking trains. However, railroads did not exist in America before 1826 so earlier runaways did not have this option. Still, many continued to travel on foot instructed by songs and tales like “Follow the Drinking Gourd” to follow the North