Kidnapping, Slavery, and the Politics of Interregional Cooperation in the Early United States

Historians of slavery in the early United States have long been aware of southern planters’ distrust of northern abolitionists. In the mid-1820s, a decade before the controversial mail campaigns launched by Garrisonian immediatists in the mid-1830s, slaveowners had already come to regard antislavery activists in the free states as their nemeses: as delusional zealots who would do and say anything to denigrate the southern way of life. As Adam Rothman, David Lightner, and Matthew Mason have each demonstrated, sectional identities had hardened considerably in the decade either side of the Missouri Compromise debates of 1820 and 1821. So fraught and strained had inter-regional contact and correspondence on the subject of slavery now become, that, by 1827, both sides had largely suspended direct communication, preferring to target their lobbying efforts upon their congressional representatives in Washington.

Or so we thought. This paper seeks to recover the extraordinary efforts of city officials in Philadelphia and officers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society  to extend their influence beyond the borders of the state and into the depths of the Cotton Kingdom. Responding to news that a gang had kidnapped and spirited away at least five free black boys from central Philadelphia in August 1825, Mayor Joseph Watson and his PAS allies spent more than three years and many thousands of dollars and man-hours leveraging a remarkably rich and frequently receptive array of contacts in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. Together, this extraordinary coalition of free state activists and slave state planters, merchants, judges and lawyers succeeded in coordinating an impressive legal and logistical operation to restore several almost forgotten victims of slavery’s blackest market to freedom in Philadelphia. Their common cause, I argue, was the peculiar product of diametrically opposite beliefs as to the strategic political benefits of demonizing the enslavement of free black children.