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This law made the kidnapping of any Black or mulatto for the purpose of making him or her a slave or indentured servant a felony punishable by a fine of $500 to $2,000 and by seven to 21 years’ imprisonment at hard labor. It also prohibited any alderman or justice of the peace under penalty of fine from exercising jurisdiction or taking cognizance of cases of fugitive slaves under the federal Fugitive Slave Act.

Prompted in part by Maryland’s appeal for Pennsylvania to implement the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, Pennsylvania in 1826 passed its own Fugitive Slave Act [Pennsylvania Archives, Ninth Series, VIII, 6417]. While ostensibly designed to assist slaveholders in recovering runaway slaves, the 1826 law actually made recovery virtually impossible. After enactment of the 1826 law, there was virtually no way for a slaveholder to recapture a fugitive slave in Pennsylvania and be safe from prosecution as a kidnapper.

Pennsylvania retreated from its forward movement in 1837 when, in its new state constitution, it repealed that portion of the 1790 Pennsylvania constitution that had given free Blacks the right to vote.

In 1842, the U.S. Supreme Court entered the fray and decimated Pennsylvania’s fugitive slave legislation. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania [41 U.S. 539], the court affirmed Congress’ right to legislate on the subject of fugitive slaves, denied states the power to legislate on fugitive slavery because that subject came within exclusive federal jurisdiction, and allowed state governments to decide whether or not their officials would help to execute the federal Fugitive Slave Act.

In response to Prigg, Pennsylvania enacted the Personal Liberty Law of 1847 [Laws of Pennsylvania, 1847]. This law provided sanctions for purchasing or removing free Blacks with the intention of reducing them to slaves; prohibited state officials from accepting jurisdiction over cases arising under the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793; provided penalties for claimants seizing slaves in a violent, tumultuous, and unreasonable manner; repealed the 1780 provision that permitted the temporary residence of slaves in the Commonwealth; and repealed Pennsylvania’s 1826 Fugitive Slave Act.

In exchange for Southern support of California’s admission to the Union as a free state and ending the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to help the South perpetuate slaveholding. This law created a force of federal commissioners empowered to pursue and return to slaveholders runaway slaves in any state. No statute of limitations applied, so that even those slaves who had been free for many years could be returned.

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He cut off his wife’s long hair and tied a scarf around her chin in pretense of her having a toothache to hide her smooth skin and disguise her voice. Ellen wore men’s clothing and green spectacles over her eyes. Because Ellen was illiterate (and a well-bred White man wouldn’t be), she wore her arm in a sling to avoid having to write. Ellen went to the train station and purchased tickets to Philadelphia for herself and her slave.

For eight days and a thousand miles, they traveled by train and steamer among White Southerners undetected. If anyone asked, they said Ellen was traveling north for medical care—a believable story given her bandages. A police officer in Baltimore asked for proof that Ellen owned William. The train’s conductor attested that they had traveled with him from Washington to Baltimore, and the hurried officer let them continue. Abolitionist and fellow escapee William Wells Brown, welcomed the Crafts when they finally arrived in Philadelphia—on Christmas Day 1848.  

What became of Ellen and William Craft?

It is a common practice for gentlemen (if I may call them such), moving in the highest circles of society, to be the fathers of children by their slaves, whom they can and do sell with the greatest impunity; and the more pious, beautiful, and virtuous the girls are, the greater the price they bring, and that too for the most infamous purposes
—William Craft

The Crafts settled in Boston following their journey, and well-known abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison encouraged them to take their tale on the antislavery lecture circuit. Ellen once again found herself in a paradox. Just as her maligned biracial birth had saved her and William, she could not tell their tale of escaping to freedom to the audiences that came to hear it—society frowned upon women speaking publicly. Instead, William told the story with Ellen standing beside him.

Warrants were issued for the Crafts’ return to Georgia, but to no avail. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, however, William and Ellen feared they would be captured and moved to England. They continued their public appearances in England and raised five children. William chronicled their escape in the 1860 memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.

In 1868, William and Ellen returned to the United States with two of their children and purchased land near Savannah, Ga. They started a plantation and opened an industrial school for African American children, where Ellen taught free of charge. Aggression and sabotage from neighboring Whites caused both ventures to fail. Ellen died in 1891 and was buried beneath her favorite tree on their land. The land was later auctioned to pay William’s debts, and he moved to Charleston, S.C., where he died in 1900.

 William and Ellen’s great-granddaughter, Ellen Craft, lived in Pittsburgh and married Donald Dammond, a 1938 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and the nephew of William Hunter Dammond, the first Black graduate of Pitt.

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When he returned to port, he learned that slave hunters had invaded his parents’ home while he was away. George had barely escaped, and the family home was destroyed. White neighbors hid Henry’s mother, and his sister Eliza was arrested and then released when her New York residency as a free slave was established. Friends spirited Henry off to Long Island, where he worked as a farmhand for two years before returning home.

What became of Henry Highland Garnet?

Henry Highland Garnet went on to become an outspoken— and sometimes controversial—opponent of slavery as well as a central figure in Black education and spiritual life. He attended New York’s African Free School between 1826 and 1833 and later enrolled in the Phoenix High School for Colored Youth. Garnet graduated from the Oneida Institute in 1839 and married Julia Williams in 1841. Their family included three children, two sons and a daughter. In 1840, a leg injury from Garnet’s youth resulted in amputation, and he needed crutches throughout his lifetime.

Nonetheless, in 1841, Garnet began an eight-year ministry at the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church in Troy, N.Y., where he developed into a fierce and emotional advocate of abolition and Black suffrage. During the 1843 Negro National Convention in Buffalo, Garnet gained notoriety with his speech, “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” which encouraged slaves to resist the institution: “Let our motto be resist, resist! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance!” Although his audience was reportedly moved to tears, such abolitionists as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, both of whom embraced moral suasion, felt that Garnet’s speech was too inflammatory. Garnet’s angry response was: “Maybe the slaves ought simply to ask for their liberty since the masters would surely let them have it.” But Garnet’s speech diminished his role as a Black leader— he was considered too volatile. Even his support of Blacks expatriating to Africa was outdated as Black delegates to the convention positioned themselves to demand equal rights on American soil.

In the 1850s, Garnet traveled around England speaking against American slavery. He also served as a missionary in Jamaica, where he founded two schools for Black children, an industrial school for women headed by his wife, and helped to establish the African Civilization Society, which stressed the importance of Black missionary work and Black entrepreneurship in Africa. He returned to the United States following the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 to help his friend and Pittsburgh abolitionist Martin R. Delany recruit Black troops for the Union Army.

In 1865, Garnet became the first Black person to deliver a sermon to the U.S. House of Representatives.