tonight, i'm happy to welcome

scott shane to the library to discuss his latest book flee north, a forgotten hero in the fight for freedom in slavery borderland in it, he recounts the life of abolitionist thomas smallwood, who bought his own freedom, helped hundreds of others escape slavery in baltimore in the underground, flee north also tells the story of the baltimore slave hope slaughter, who shaped who shipped hundreds of people south from the inner harbor, often separating them from their families forever. this the author will be joined in conversation by journalist scott shane is a former reporter for the new york times and baltimore sun. he is the author of objective troy a terrorist president and the rise of the drone in dismantling utopia. how information ended the soviet union michael fletcher is a senior writer. espn's enterprise and investigative team. he formerly reporter for espn's the undefeated and the

washington post. he is a coauthor of supreme discomfort, the divided soul of clarence thomas. in his review of the book for the washington post, richard crighton, who wrote flee north, a gripping story, told at a brisk pace in a no fuss of practice. reporter is a model of the advantages that journalists can bring to the writing of history it is the kind of story sorely need at a time when there is no of opportunities for inspiring acts of heroism. award winning historian henry louis gates comment. the book restores american history one of the most daring african american abolition, author of a long neglected slave narrative who not only courageously fought slavery but brilliantly satirized it in then publisher starred review. they wrote this astonishing and propulsive narrative racist wrong by returning smollett to prominence. it's an absolute must read. it is my great pleasure to welcome scott shane michael fletcher to the pratt library.

yeah, thank you everyone and have to say it's a privilege to be here with my old friend and colleague. and when i say old, i mean long, you know, of long standing. and i mean the other thing i was going to ask you about, you know, scott and i worked together at the baltimore and, you know, back then, like everyone else in the newsroom, i had the utmost for scott's work. he had such range as a reporter. he could find compelling stories and research laboratories on street corners, even at the nsa you know, this guy knew how to do his job. and it was always it was just always who you know, who i respected and i think everyone in the room looked up to. and he's done it again. he's done again. another compelling piece, this book is is so, so interesting.

it's a fascinating read that for me kind of reordered how i thought about how i think about the underground railroad. it sort of added a lot of context, a lot of have to the story. i knew in the story i had learned in school was about harriet tubman and, the quakers and, you know, that's basically what i knew again. and then this book certainly expands that. so, you know, congrats relation scott i think you've thank you for your service here. let's start here in the in the subtitle of the book, you call thomas smallwood a forgotten hero. why forgotten? well, you know, i think when i kind of came across him and dug into his life and found out more and more about him, not only the escapes he'd organized, but also the fact that he'd about those escapes. you know, my question, why do we not know about this guy and

there is an answer to that. he you know, he ends up in canada running for his own life. he operating a clandestine network. he wrote about the escapes, but he wrote about them under a pseudonym. but i think there's another element, which is that his white colleagues, for the most part, just left him out of the story. so i was warned against not with the microphone. so i'll try to hold it still. but i think you know, i think it was there's also an element of even closest partner in this operation story just sort of failing to credit him with what he so, you know, i think in you know if justice is done, this guy will be very well known. his story will be taught in schools. and if we could only a picture of him, we could we could build a statue. you know what's amazing? and you mention he's so, you know, small was a shoemaker

living as a free black man in washington, d.c. with slavery, operating all around him. how did manage to organize his escapes kind of how did his operation work? well, so he had been born in slavery himself in bladensburg outside d.c. and then bought his freedom time over a of time for $500, paid it off when he was about the age of 30. he's free. he starts this shoemaking business he marries has a bunch of kids he's got four kids at the time and another one is on the way and. so know he has sort of vowed a war on slavery but isn't really know how to carry it out. and he's a busy guy and it's really when this guy, charles torrey, comes to town and the two of them meet that they find that they're thinking along the same lines they're tired of

talking about how terrible slavery is and they want to do something about it. and crunk, in a concrete sense. and so they start organizing these escapes. and you know that there are several things that set, set escapes apart, especially the beginning. they were not just waiting people to decide. they wanted to to run. they actually approach and slave people that small would knew and say, you know, what are you doing on saturday night and which was which was actually a popular time for a successful escapes because there was a little more freedom on sunday and they weren't looking for you on sunday morning. so and so they were actually recruiting to run and the other thing was they weren't for the most part setting people off in ones twos. they were trying do it by the wagon load. and so, you know, repeatedly you read about a wagon load of ten,

a wagon load of 12, wagon load of 1518. and this would be men women and children in you know, covered with something, taking off in the middle of the middle of the night. this is such an interesting, odd couple, i think tori and smallwood. and not only did they freak as a people, but then they turned around and rubbed it in the faces of the enslavers. i mean, describe that smallwood would write these columns mocking in slavery saying it. we did it. we pulled this off. yeah. and you know, when i remember when i read the book, you know, early on i said, where did you get the courage, you know, to do that. yes. yeah. and where did you get the motivation in a way. i mean, that's one of the things i just think of in a practical sense, is he's running this shoe making business by day. he's helping organize these escapes by night. when does he find time to, you know, settle down, light a candle or whatever and, you know, write up these that he then mails off to.

but somehow he did it. you mentioned the odd couple. so charles story is about a years younger. he he was not from wealthy family outside boston but he was from a well-connected his parents died of tuberculosis this and he was by a grandfather who had actually served in congress. he went to exeter. he went to yale so he had sort of an elite education in. but he so in that sense, he was sort the opposite of thomas smallwood, who had first been taught to read by his enslaver, and then was a servant in a house household of an educator in washington, a guy who ran a number of schools and, that guy who was from scotland and his adult children, all apparently took an interest in thomas and

you know, sort of getting him into literature. and so on so strangely enough i think by the time they meet in the beginning of 1842, despite those very different backgrounds, i think their education were in some ways comparable because smallwood had just absorbed this from all over the place and later, you know, he's sort of constantly quoting philosophers and quoting poets and showing how much he knew. and i think the other thing they had in common over the chasm of race, age and edge, formal education was as tory had been as a new who became an abolitionist he'd been on the lecture circuit, he'd been involved in these kind of internecine fights in the in the abolitionist community. so he'd been a lot of overheated meeting halls talking 4 hours and smallwood had taken an

interest in colonization which was this movement for african-americans just give up on this country and move to somewhere else sierra leone barbados but also in particular liberia which the colony in west africa that had been founded by the american cotton society and there was a big debate in the black community in d.c., in baltimore over this question basically came to is this a good thing to just leave the country that you the only country you know behind and try to get a new start somewhere else and also eventually kind of what are the motives of the white people who were financing this operation? and smallwood was very interested for a number of years. and then you know you get the feeling that the scales fell from his eyes and he realized that basically we're talking about ethnic cleansing and that the the white people who were

funding the american colonization society actually, their problem was not with enslaved black people, it was with free black people. and they wanted to just, you know, usher them out of the country. and so he broke with that and tried to convince all his friends to break with that. he, too, had been involved in a whole lot of talk. right. so you get the feeling they come together in 1842 and they're both ready to do something very concrete. and that's what they do. yeah. and very radical, too, right? and very radical. very dangerous. now, how did these columns go over so well? the you know, the tory comes to town is he has a he's a guy who tried his hand as teaching and then briefly tries his hand at preaching and just flames out completely in both of those professions. and so then becomes caught up in the anti-slavery cause. and he's going to his new idea

is to be a correspondent for a bunch of small abolitionist papers in the north. he'll come to dc, he'll cover congress. he'll cover the debates over slavery and he'll send his dispatches. north north. but you, you get the feeling that he was much more interested in what he could do, sort of hands and anti-slavery than than even these columns off. but the one of the papers he is connected with or he's he's formed a little bit of relationship with is a little in albany then called toxin of liberty toxin or an old word for bell basically it's the liberty bell and it's a small abolitionist paper and he's sending his columns off to them as he gets his start. but once they get these wagon loads going off at night, it appears that smallwood, who takes the lead and and certainly

continues use to send these dispatches and you know his it's you know if i could get a half hour with thomas smallwood i would i'd pay a lot money for that. and one of the questions i would ask him is just like, what were you about? you know what? why were you taking this somewhat risky step, even if you're writing it under a pseudonym of calling attention to the escapes, you know, using the real names of the enslavers using real the people who escaped writing it in real time and. i have not found any other example of of somebody writing about escapes in real time. and it was so much in real time that small would occasionally mentions that he had to hold a column and not send it off to albany until he was sure he heard from. usually canada that the people he was writing about were already on the other side of the border. but i think part it was his

personality, his interest in, literature. he was a big fan of charles, and he took his pseudonym from charles dickens and he kind of liked that dickensian satirical style. but i also think for him as well as for tory, there was sort of a larger strategy that was that was part of their plan what they wanted to demoralize people. yeah they wanted to not just move these people, you know, in whatever numbers they could out of the reach of the enslavers but their hope was that see you know there were people in dc people baltimore who had say owned half a dozen people and they wake up one morning and they're gone. and that was lot of money. you know, i calculated i made a rough calculation that a wagon

load 15 people that would describes might have been worth something. like $200,000 in today's dollars. and so you're talking about a big chunk of people's even wealthy people's wealth just disappearing overnight. so i think they were hoping to essentially undermine faith in this in the system. and smallwood describes overhearing a couple of these in because he would lurk and even drop them in his neighborhood and at the market at the rail station and he'd hear some of the people who he was relieving, shall we say, of their human property and writing about he'd hear talking, you. and so he heard them talking a couple of them talking how i'm never going to buy slave. i'm done with this. and of course, that was music to his ears because what he wanted,

he wanted to say, you know, it's a heck of a lot easier. just hire somebody, pay them. what an extraordinary thing. and to me, this story hasn't been totally lost to history. but until now, small would was you know, people didn't know about him. why do you think that is? well i think to tory came from a a strong community of abolitionists in massachusetts. he'd been active on the scene in massachusetts abolition a few years before coming south d.c. so he's kind of well-connected up there when dies he gets a manure in a beautiful graveyard in cambridge kind of like an obelisk. it has a has his face on it has some quotations and now it's surrounded by flowers. it's it's really quite lovely.

and he also he died another abolitionist kind of pulled together a memoir of tory that's mostly drawn his journals and his correspondence and then in more recent years, i the 2013, a distant cousin of tory, wrote a, you know, modern a very good modern biography of charles story. so he is not a well-known figure, but he has he has certainly not been ignored, whereas smallwood i think it's fair to say, has been ignored and you know, part of it is. the fact that he operated under a pseudonym and that he, he moved canada. but i think there's definitely more to it. you in his later years tory was writing his letters are mostly preserved or many of them are preserved. and he was writing about the escape operations at a time when

smallwood safely in canada and, and even when smallwood had been named outed in the in the baltimore sun. in fact and so was no reason to withhold his name certainly in a private letter but did and he took essentially took credit for the escapes that smallwood had organized not only with tory but on his own, because tory went off to be the editor of that paper in albany. and so for a year or more, smallwood was doing this all by himself. and so so i think there is a racial element. this an element of of racism of of sort not crediting. god knows why exactly with what he had achieved and maybe a little bit of a desperation on tories part to leave his on

history and to prove to the many doubters, even in his own family that he had. he he'd accomplished something. yeah, i in a review that ran in a very fine newspaper i worked for many years they point out that you kind of slept around a little bit, you know, for you know, for not giving credit. smallwood and i think the word they use that the will use as churlish, churlish service. i don't know you to be mean, scott, but why did you why did you say that? well, so, so i first of all, i mean, i think that the the post review was fabulous and and i even mind the reviewer calling me churlish i like that word churlish i've always liked that word yeah but that's a great read. but i think i think he and i disagree. but he and i actually exchanged emails after the review ran and, and he makes a very good point, which is that charles tory

risked everything doing everything his family, his his life for cause for the anti-slavery cause. and that's why this reviewer thought it was kind of a little nit picking to point out that he had credited smallwood but you know, there were consequences that no one's heard of. smallwood i mentioned tories lovely gray, very impressive grave and sort of memorial in in cambridge, mass and tory is grave is in the toronto necropolis and the old toronto city and my wife franzi and i who's here spend a lot of time tromping around that graveyard looking for any trace of

smallwood's and it he is buried there. there's record that shows he's buried there. but any stone has long since sunk the grass and there's no sign that, you know, that he was ever there. interesting. i learned something many things reading this book. one was you write that small god was the one who coined the term underground. yeah. that's that's the origin of the term. and how were you able as a journalist to pin that down to of sort of know that that's so it's sort of a fun story concerning there's a about slavery and basically it has a baltimore, i'm pleased to say so there was a note police constable by the name john zelle and he, like a lot of police in those days made much of his money on the side running people who had fled slavery and

dragging them back for. the reward money that the enslaver was offering and so what smallwood from somebody who overheard this guy, john zelle exclaiming in frustration one day, you know, i don't know how these people are escaping. they're not leaving a trace. they must getting away by underground railroad or steam balloon. and that's basically like we would say, they must have been teleported canada or or they must have been abducted by aliens. in other words, i no clue how they're getting out of here because there were no underground railroads. there were railroads, but not underground. and steam balloon, sort of like an experimental technology, we could say. so. so apparently got wind of this and he he in somewhat snarky fashion, advises slaveholder who has lost his who's smallwood

once puts it in one place puts it whose human property whose walking property had walked off. he advises that person that perhaps left by the underground railroad or steam balloon that this console was was swearing about the day and then clearly something clicked and smallwood thought this is great because first of all, it was a huge compliment to him. and this operation. and so he starts riffing on the notion of an underground railroad and he he advises the slave holders to report to the office of the underground railroad in washington for word of their missing property. and he at one point says he can't reveal the secret of the underground railroad is only known to the president and the cabinet. this guy lived a 15 minute walk from the u.s. capitol. so sort of an inside the beltway joke way ahead of the beltway

and and at one point, he names. general agent of all the branches, the national underground railroad. so but, you know, you ask how how can i sure that no one else had used it before. and i can't be absolutely sure, but in terms of print newspapers, you know, i just into these giant wonderful newspaper databases that they have now that are growing all the time. but newspapers dot com is one another one is called genealogy banks and they they go way back and they go way back before the 1840s. and if you put in underground railroad and also because they're the way they wrote it out was somewhat variable at the time so yes sometimes underground railroad was four words and that to you put that into these search engines and you find that the very first references are smallwood's

letters. and you know in the months after that you begin to see some people it up and use it as he did, as essentially a way to the slave holders. and then eventually within a couple years, it's become a sort of fairly commonplace way, a handy way to refer to escapes from slavery generally. but i it's it's the evidence is very clear that he's the who, you know, put this phrase on the map you you say you called the area with smallwood operator d.c. baltimore area bordering the free state of pennsylvania roughly slavery borderland yeah two things. why did why was work so important? they're like where you know you so close to freedom so to speak a and b describe kind of the daily horror of free black people living in this borderland

region. so, yeah, struck me was that if you think about new orleans, you're never to meet an abolitionist or you're almost never going to meet an abolitionist. right. if you think about boston never going to meet a slave trader in baltimore, in washington, all of these people are mixed up together. enslaved african-americans are there in numbers. free african-americans in those cities actually outnumber the enslaved people by a considerable margin. so you have all these different types mixing it up in a way they don't anywhere else. and think it's a very combustible and, you know, and clear from the story i'm telling the 1840s, but just an aside something that happened in in the 1820s was a local

abolitionist publisher a guy named benjamin lundy had called the leading slave trader of that era a monster in human shape, among other things. and so the slave trader ran into him as lundy was trying to go to the post office one day and basically beat the -- out of him and and lundy sued and. it ends up in court, but the courts were very kind of pro-slavery and the judge says i've never seen a worse for a beating and finds the slave trader $1 so you had these of very combustible you know this kind of combustible mix all time and one of the other things that you realize as you read about is that while, you know manumission crossing, being enslaved to

being is obviously an enormous for somebody living in maryland you're not crossing into full citizenship by any means and you know, just following the the life of thomas smallwood, who was enslaved then was free, you realize. you know, when he was free, like everyone else who was black in this region, in the city, baltimore city, washington, there was a 10 p.m. curfew. if on the street for any reason after 10 p.m., you get hauled into the police station, you can be fined, you can be beaten, you can be lashed and you know, and actually the, cops would sometimes park themselves outside churches at night. black churches, because if people kind of get caught up in the spirit and they overrun the 10 p.m., they can get a whole bunch of churchgoing people on

their way out. and, you know, extort some bribes or some money. so, you know, you couldn't travel out of state and come back in unless you did some got a special essentially permission to do it, some government paperwork and at any even you were free you were subject the unscrupulous bounty hunters who would grab free people take them to the slave trader and you know and the next thing you know you're you're shipped hundreds miles from your family. incredible. i was surprised to read about hope slaughter, a slave trader who operates in what is now like baltimore's tourist. exactly. his or his was were howard and pratt streets? yes. ran on pratt and then on north side of pratt. right. just east of howard and. so he he was the biggest slave trader in town from about 1838

to 1848. but were a half dozen major slavd mo of them were located generally around the inner harbor, which then known as the basin and basically what had happened was this region had a of agricultural labor because tobacco was out soil. and so this very labor intensive tobacco crop was being replaced by grain, other kinds of crops that needed fewer farm hands. so you know, many were actually many emitted freed by their enslavers in maryland in the early years of the 19th century. but then what happened was the cotton gin was invented and the cotton plantations of the deep south started to boom and there the demand for labor down there was insane viable. so instead of just freeing the people, you know no longer needed you know, you could summon send a note down to hope

slatter at his slave jail that was the terminology his private slave jail on pratt street. and he would send his boys to come collect, you know, whoever was and give you hundred dollars, $600, and then would collect a a shipload, basically, and put them on a ship and send them down to new orleans how many people are we talking? and we're, you know, the ships usually had other cargo as well but from the manifests this was actually there were there was good record keeping by the federal government strangely enough because the african trade had been banned which was the reason the source of labor was, you know, domestic and people and so they to kind of make sure these people were not coming from africa, the the shippers required to have a detailed with

the name age and other details on all the people who were put on board. so we know that, you know, a typical load for slaughter might be 40, 50, 60, as many as a hundred people on a ship they would usually be put down in the hold it wasn't as gruesome as the middle passage, but the peak of shipping people south was really the winter months. so when they were leaving here, it was, you know, it could be very cold and and there, you know, people in some cases were shackled. and so you could imagine they shackled usually in the hold with. a lot of, you know, it could be livestock could be all kinds of things that were being sent down there, could be wet so a kind of nasty journey of about three weeks. usually you get so slight of my traffic. well, how many people a year you'd say. i mean, hundreds, you know,

hundreds and and on in each case they would go to the new orleans showroom room, believe it or not, that was the term when like a car was like a car showroom, where his brother would operate the sort of southern end of the business and would come from the from the, you know, the plantations and buy people. and, you know, part of the tragedy of the domestic slave trade is that if you weren't separated your family when you were sold to slatter, which often you were, because you know, an enslaver might say, i'm going to sell the wife, but not husband. i'm going to sell the mother. but, you know, the kids can here so that constantly the families being separated there. but if you made it intact as a family, new orleans, you know, once you could be sent off to the plantation even in different states.

so, you know, that's something that's hard to imagine, but if you were shipped off hundreds and hundreds of miles from your family, it was likely you would never see them again. and, you know, a sort of poignant footnote is that for decades after the civil war, black families were placing ads basically in papers saying they were sometimes called lost friends ads. and it would say, do you have any idea where my mother is here's here's her name, here's a description. and she was some of the mentioned hopes letter. she was taken away by hope's letter. you know, in 1847. and i've never seen her again. amazing. you know, all those slave trading was legal and, lucrative as we know it. somehow was not respectable. right. and at least in certain circles in, baltimore and i this book is

so serious and there's so many sad things i chuckled in places reading about hope's letters kind of quest for respectability. yeah, he seems to have quested not only for money, which he made an awful lot, but for respectability and for acceptance among baltimore's slaveholding, elite. and what's interesting, you know, it's sort of the psychology that's interesting it seems the slave holders, they were very dependent on the slave traders. they used the services of the slave traders. they wanted to look down on. and so you could tell yourself that you were a kind and you were treating your people well and you were feeding them well. but that, i hope, slatter, you know, he's just all about the money. so he so there's funny little things you can you know in researching this book that i came across one being that there

building a big new lovely i think was greek revival. methodist church on charles street church is gone now but it was brand and one way they raised the money for a church those days was they would sell the pews so you would pay a subset annual sum and that would be your pew forever, i guess. and so slatter a pew in one of his churches. but you know i found a letter to to i a letter to to the editor of a in which the guy who'd bought the pew behind slatter said he and his family were not going go to church until. you know, if there was any chance of having to look on this despicable trader so he couldn't get a break and eventually he he finds respect moving to the deep south himself. yeah yeah. i want to ask you a little bit

about kind of the journalism here, how did you get on to this story? how when did you first learn about small and and this much about a domestic slave trade? and what was it that made you think this a book? well actually goes back probably about 25 years we'd been for quite a few years in the nineties. we've been living in baltimore for quite a few years that at that time when i kind of thought i knew the city, i knew the history, the city a little bit and somewhere i came across the fact that this the slave trade had had thrived at the harbor for many, many years, kind of 1810 till the civil war. and i read a little more about slave trade. i was just completely shocked by it. and i found that most of my colleagues at the baltimore did not know this was news to them to. so i got some eye rolls from the editors i remember who did remind me this is a newspaper, but they me write a long story about the slave trade in

baltimore and i always wanted to come back to it because i found it such a such an affecting. and one that was so little known to i think most americans. so when i quit day job at the new york times at 29, at the end of 2019, you my plan was to start researching it looking for a story in the slave trade. of course, there was a pandemic. the archives all closed and libraries closed and but i also found that virtually everyone who was being south was illiterate and the slave traders were not leaving detailed journals. so it very difficult to find a story strictly in the slave trade. so i started kind of looking around and i about a guy on an abolitionist who died in the maryland penitentiary. and you know that i started following that thread. eventually i come across torrey

and, a guy who's more or less portrayed in the in the few books that mention him smallwood but smallwood is comes across as sort of a really a black sidekick, black helper of charles story. and then i kind of dig in on smallwood and increasingly realize small was about a years older than torrey and a whole lot more wise and reliable. so it you know torrey has his strengths, one of them being just sort of a wild, reckless illness and boldness, but but it was really the other around that, that torrey was the sidekick to smallwood. and then when eventually i taught the boston library into the boston public library, into digging what looks like the fullest run of this obscure

albany abolitionist paper, and they put it on microfilm. you know, who knew they were still microfilm things, but they put it on microfilm. and i spent it a long day at the boston public library downloading it from microfilm onto a thumb drive, and then a lot of long days reading this fine print. and once i, you know, had read a lot of smallwood's letters. i just said, you know, this guy is the core of this book. so, yeah, i noticed in the acknowledgment acknowledgments you talk about a phone call from your brother who makes a brotherly joke. you know, he's like, you. we're going to hear from a white guy. yeah, i believe his. give me his. i think, i think when when i got a contract to write this book. i mentioned it to him he said, oh that's that's great. scott. it's about time we heard what white think about this and right here you go. you know from your from your very you're your own brother.

yeah, right, right, right, yeah, yeah. as only your brother can do. so your brother can. and you know, i had you deal with that. i mean i did take that to heart. yeah. in the sense that i, you know, i guess i try to approach it with a certain amount of humility and to understand that i don't have the experience to fully comprehend guy like smallwood what he was going through then. but, but one of the things that has always kind of bugged me is the way black history is shut it off to the side. and it's in february and lord knows there's a lot of good history taught in february that very reason. but it always has. perplexed me and sort of annoyed that slavery is treated as black history to be dealt with.

in february, you know letter. you may be surprised hear was not black and the people enslaved you know at that time 3 million people were not black. this is white history. you this is american history and history. and in that sense i guess. i have been i've taken weird encouraged men from the ron desantis of the world talking how white people are getting their feelings hurt and so on. i think that that strain our politics, which i find kind of absurd and makes it all the more important for white people to read about this history and maybe even to write about this history. yeah, i think we've reached the point in the program where want to hear questions from the audience there, microphones on each side. so if you have a question, please don't be shy. you know, line up.

scott's full of answers. and one final thing. you know what people are thinking of questions i'm sure. those are the hot property and you have to show me they're funny. you know, my publisher tells me he's one of the folks at my publishing office telling me that since the pandemic been very hard to sell, nonfiction books for them, to sell them to public and it was not easy to sell this book actually. i think it was rejected by some of the finest in america. and i don't know, you know, the the white guy writing about slavery may have been a little bit of a factor in this era. you know there may have even been some doubt about is it really true that this guy has discovered someone who, you know, we never really knew

about? so there may have been some skepticism. this guy who about i had just spent 15 years writing for the new york times about security. you know i have absolutely no credentials to write this. so so that might have been too interesting to go to the questions start here. good evening. i have two questions for you. the first one is, did you get any information about smallwood's descendants or get to meet any of them. and the second question is, what were his pseudonyms? okay, so i have done some work on ancestry.com hunting descendants, one of the tragic facts of thomas smallwood's life is that he lives to a ripe age, but all his five children predeceased him, and most of them die without children. but there were some children, and i've traced them to a certain point. but i have not found any living

descendants. but frankly, i got to get back to it because i think there may well be some. my guess is i think i've counted seven generations or something like that. so my guess is when i contact them, it's going to be a big surprise to them that they're that they're, you know, descended from this guy. but it would be really a fun a fun thing to do and something i'm going to keep pursuing in terms of smallwood's pseudonym, as i think i mentioned, he was a big of charles dickens. dickens at that time. i guess it was in 1840, had published the pickwick papers and. it was it became a kind of global bestseller. it was a huge, hugely popular novel. and so smallwood so there's a character in there named sam weller or sam weller, which i think is dickens way, the of trying to capture this cockney accent and so smallwood calls himself somerville weller jr,

sam weller's son and and has a lot of fun with that and one of the this is something like i can't prove one way or the other, but in the middle of everything we're talking about, charles dickens makes a trip to the united states and he makes stops in washington. he makes stops in baltimore. he comments on slavery. baltimore. he comments being in a baltimore restaurant, in a hotel and served by someone, by a waiter who he suddenly realizes and he talks about his feelings of kind of horror, of being, you know, sort of served by an enslaved man anyway in the guise of sam weller in these columns, the albany paper, smallwood says i met dickens when he came to town and i, you know, led him to a slave jail that was there was kind of an infamous slave trader in washington by name of william

williams. and his slave jail was right. the national mall, believe it or not, if you walked from the white house to the capitol, you go right by and according to this, you know, true or account samuel or i smallwood helped lead dickens to see this slave jail and. could this be true. it definitely you know small was in town dickens was followed by a big crowd as he went around town because he very popular guy and so it's certainly possible that smallwood was in the crowd following dickens around and also small dickens was very interested in slavery which appalled. so if someone had said i could he does not describe this in his book which is called american notes. but if someone said mr. dickens,

you want to see a slave premises, sure, he would have said, let's go so so it could have been true. it could have been true. thank you very much for this talk. and i really want to thank you also for this wonderful book that you've written. i wondered i had another question. the research that you did to get this story. and i wondered if in your research you came across information that discussed other members of the community in which mr. smallwood lived for example were there other freedmen freed women who may also have explore some level of either retribution or suspicion that they may have been involved in this were there was whether articles in papers that were written that were accused.

others also. so, you know, as a large of people are getting board this underground railroad, they may have left family members behind. do we have any information that it was a you that his heroics also may have had some unintended for other people in the area. thank you so much wow that's a that's a that's bunch of good questions let me think i mean there's actually a moment where small in one of these dispatches mocks the police for having picked up a guy on suspicion basically of being smallwood of being the guy who's organized these escapes and apparently that guy was set free. but smallwood has a grand time basically saying, you know, you dummies, he calls them poor puppies at one point, you know, he has lots of names for the cops and and and he says, know

you picked up the wrong guy, you're on the wrong trail, you guys are hopeless and in both baltimore and washington, there were large rewards offered by apparently little syndicates of slave traders and slave holders for the arrest of whoever was behind these escapes and the the then the other question had to do with separating families. i mean, one of the great ironies, of course of taking of a moment when it's possible to run is that you're probably leaving some or, you know, some of your family members behind rarely. you know, would it be possible to for you know let's say six members of a family. enslaved in one place or two places to coordinate everything and get away arousing suspicion all at the same time so that

people definitely did depart art. and you see occasionally smallwood will address the enslaver again always by name. these are real people i found them, you know i found in the records and he'll address someone and say you know this the woman who used to work for you is now living in toronto and she misses her husband, you know. couldn't you see to see fit to let him join his family and you know in toronto or something like that. so it was definitely a the only thing you can say is that the person who was fleeing knew where the rest of the family was and they could make efforts to either raise the money to buy their freedom to help escape, sometimes, you know, long distance you think about harriet tubman going back down into dorchester county again and again. she knew where her family members were and she kept trying

get them out and she got them out. so it was not the question of being separated forever in many cases as the slave trade resulted in. one other thing occurs to me is that after smallwood is in canada living there has just gotten there, but he's living there with his family and trying to make a new life. you know, three men come to him and say, you helped us get here. would you help wives and children get here? and he's like, i'm he was like, oh my god, you know? but he he did it. he did it. he went to work to try and make it happen. we have time for two more questions. hello and i'm enjoying myself listening. i am. my name is kim manuel. and i had an uncle that was born in 1871. he was a slave. he wasn't born as a slave

because they had a certain amount of freedom and a 1871, he did work for penny a day where he talked to us about, you know, the different. so he said he was born free, but he still slave instincts. and so he got to a certain and he went into the army. but even in all me, he was saying that when he got a certain amount of quarters, you have to go and do something else different. so he made bullets and the copper mine in south baltimore for the would oh me and is so exciting to hear even before he was born that it was a trade a thing going on and listening you talk is so education now and it

hits a lot of good things. and my uncle died in 1987. no kid. until he was 116 years long. life. all right. yeah. well, i want to thank you for this. i enjoyed reading about this period of time that you wrote about. it's my understanding that. around 1808, that kind of ceased the middle. however, in the chesapeake which makes this book very interesting, you're writing about, african-americans were bred. yes. and that that's most of at two and a half generations. so this motion that you talk about going to from ball to war to new orleans makes for an interesting dynamic in the sense that from there there kind of spread throughout america.

what i do find interesting that you keep speaking in reference to kind like whole families when in fact during the time of breeding it wasn't quite that way. and the other element that i hear coming from you is fact that there seems to be some complicity with regard to the federal government. and that they know more than what they are revealing. do people like myself and it would seem to me, hopefully based on your research that somehow we could better records with regards to the chattel because they did do good recognition on things that they perceive even to be mercantile. yes. well those those are there's all great points. i mean, the reason feds kept these metaphors of the domestic slave trade was essentially

enforcing that law that you referred to in 1808 that said you could no longer import captives, captive workers from africa, but beyond that, you know you know, during the we're talking about the census never recorded the names of enslaved people. just gender and age, generally speaking in the u.s. census and it was only later on that people began to be recognized really in the post slavery period as as human beings. so there's a huge vacuum of information about those who were enslaved. and smallwood is a bit of an example. he wrote a memoir, a short memoir in, 1851. and he makes no reference whatsoever to his parents. and i couldn't identify his

parents from existing records and it made me wonder whether as you point out i'm to whole families but in fact families were constantly being shattered and split. and it made me wonder whether his parents might have been separated from him at a very early age and moved somewhere else in maryland, or shipped down to orleans and. but i found it you potentially. well, i found it kind of poignant and, potentially very significant that. he doesn't talk about his parents. mm hmm. well is that it, cleve? is that. yes, it is. thank you. well, thank you, scott. and thank all of you. i guess we've reached the book signing for. thank you,

i want to just s o