Against the peace and dignity

By Denise Lincoln

A recent tour of Cape Girardeau's 1850s-era landscape, buildings, and culture stirred the legends of area tunnels and Underground Railroad activity into conversation. Court records in Perry and Cape Girardeau Counties provide evidence that abolitionists -- America's first civil rights advocates -- were indeed engaged in secret work to usher slaves toward freedom, but provide no proof Cape's utilitarian tunnels played a role.

People who took up the cause to disrupt and oppose slavery were not welcomed in pre-Civil War Southeast Missouri. Abolitionists were considered single-issue political moralists and meddlers, "not from here," sent to steal property and incite insurrection by planting ideas of achievable freedom in the minds of the enslaved. The work was dangerous and punishable with fines and imprisonment by the laws of the state.

In 1846, Joseph Whitmore, a 22-year-old shoemaker, was tried in Perry County, charged with "enticing away a slave ... with the intent to effect the freedom of a slave ... against the peace and dignity of the State of Missouri." And in 1851, Thomas Hart was tried in Cape Girardeau County and convicted on the same charge. Hart seems to have been English-born, single, and a 23-year-old cabinetmaker living in Rhode Island the year before his encounter with the law and courts in Missouri.

A monument to the Underground Railroad in Battle Creek, Michigan, depicts "conductors" Harriet Tubman, and Erastus and Sarah Hussey, guiding freedom-seeking slaves to safety along their journey north.Submitted photo

While Whitmore and Hart were caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to the Missouri Penitentiary (for two and three years, respectively), they represented only two risk-takers at the first steps of the freedom trail. A network of other "agents" was needed to secretly assist escapees from Missouri to Canada. These activists fade from history unnamed, without definitive records of the thousands of fugitives who successfully traversed the freedom trail. The Missouri Statesman, Aug. 29, 1845, reported complaints of a Perry County owner losing a valuable slave who crossed the Mississippi River at Chester, Illinois, and eluded pursuit due to "a colony of abolitionists organized for the business of slave stealing." Darrell Dexter's book "Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois" points to the collaboration of Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) across Southern Illinois. These small property farmers, merchants and wagoneers lived 15 to 20 miles apart and cooperated to provide a protected route for freedom-seekers from Chester to Sparta to Eden and further along the northeastern trail toward freedom. Agents put themselves at great risk, but the courageous dare of the freedom-seekers must also be considered. Yearning for self-determined freedom sustained the enslaved to resist, risk, and change their circumstance.

Canada was the destination of freedom-seekers. Madison Ross, born into slavery near Commerce, Missouri, told of his grandfather's escape from Scott County to Canada (see Library of Congress slave narrative collection -- loc.gov/resource/mesn.100/?sp=303). However, research on soldiers enlisted with the 102nd U.S. Colored Troop regiment provides firm evidence that many who escaped their Southeast Missouri enslavement found their "promised land" in southwest Michigan before the Civil War. The names and stories of these soldiers will be featured in a future column.