runaway slaves

Brutalities Suffered By Slaves on the Plantations of the Antebellum South
Civil War Memories

Brutalities Suffered By Slaves on the Plantations of the Antebellum South

08/03/2024 Bruce Strom 0

In most systems of slavery, in both the ancient world and the Antebellum South, masters could beat, maim, and even murder their slaves, since slaves were property. However, abuse of slaves eased somewhat under the influence of the Stoic Philosophers and early Church Fathers. But it was common, in the Antebellum South, for masters to abuse their slaves, though they rarely killed them, since they were valuable property. But no mercy was shown to slaves who were brutally whipped by their masters, which Frederick Douglass often witnessed. No mercy was shown to suffering slaves in the Antebellum South. […]

Margaret Fleeing to Freedom With Help From Watch, Her Mastiff, and Epictetus on True Freedom
Civil War Memories

Margaret Ward Fleeing to Freedom With Help From Watch, Her Mastiff, and Epictetus on True Freedom

07/26/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Margaret was willing to make the best of her situation, she was willing to serve her master’s family as she served Jesus, she compassionately cared for her master’s family, as long as they respected her human dignity. Once they crossed the line, without hesitation, she immediately fled for freedom with her infant, guided and protected only by God and the North Star.
Epictetus discusses how the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus that “slavery is no more bad than good, and freedom no more good than bad,” he proclaims proudly: “If I were a slave and one of these men was my master, I would torment him, even if it earned me a thrashing a day.” […]

Arnold Gragston: Slave Conductor on the Underground Railroad Assists Runaway Slaves
Civil War Memories

Arnold Gragston: Slave Conductor on the Underground Railroad Assists Runaway Slaves

07/13/2024 Bruce Strom 2

Gragston remembers: “Mr Tabb was a pretty good man. He used to beat us, sure; but not nearly so much as others did, some of his own kin people, even. But he was kinda funny sometimes; he used to have a special slave who didn’t have nothing to do but teach the rest of us—we had about ten on the plantation, and a lot on the other plantations near us—how to read and write and figger. Mr Tabb liked us to know how to figger. But sometimes when he would send for us and we would be a long time coming, he would ask us where we had been. If we told him we had been learning to read, he would near beat the daylights out of us—after getting somebody to teach us; I think he did some of that so that the other owners wouldn’t say he was spoiling his slaves.” […]

Fleeing Female Slave Impersonates Planter, Husband Posing As Trusty Servant: William & Ellen Craft
Civil War Memories

Fleeing Female Slave Impersonates Planter, Husband Posing As Trusty Servant: William & Ellen Craft

05/08/2024 Bruce Strom 1

In the 1850s, “William and Ellen Craft were slaves in the State of Georgia.” Their “desire to be free was very strong.” It was rare for slaves that deep in the Confederacy to successfully flee, but it “occurred to William and Ellen, that she might act the part of master and her husband the part of servant.”
“Ellen was fair enough to pass for white,” but how to transform her into a young planter? She needed to “dress elegantly in a fashionable suit of male attire, and have her hair cut in the style usually worn by young planters.” But she was beardless. So, they muffled up the face of the young planter as if he were “suffering badly with a toothache.” […]

Margaret Garner, Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child to Avoid Slavery, Inspiration for Beloved
Civil War Memories

Margaret Garner, Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child to Avoid Slavery, Inspiration for Beloved

04/24/2024 Bruce Strom 2

Our author Levi Coffin remembers, “Perhaps no case” regarding “fugitive slaves attracted more attention and aroused deeper interest and sympathy than the case of Margaret Garner, the slave mother, who killed her child rather than see it taken back to slavery.” This is a troubling story. I do not wish […]

Siege of Vicksburg: Ordinary Union Soldiers and Generals Grant and Sherman Recount the Struggle
Civil War Memories

Siege of Vicksburg: Ordinary Union Soldiers and Generals Grant and Sherman Recount the Struggle

04/20/2024 Bruce Strom 4

General Grant remembers: “The North had become very much discouraged. Many strong Union men believed that the war must prove a failure. The elections of 1862 had gone against the party which was for the prosecution of the war to save the Union if it took the last man and the last dollar. Voluntary enlistments had ceased through the greater part of the North, and the draft had been adopted to fill up the ranks. It was my judgment at the time that to make a backward movement from Vicksburg to Memphis, would be interpreted, by many of those yet full of hope for preservation of the Union, as a defeat, and that the draft would be resisted, desertions ensue, and the power to capture and punish deserters lost. There was nothing left to be done but to go forward to a decisive victory.” […]

Underground Railroad: Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped From Slavery Via Mail Express
Civil War Memories

Underground Railroad: Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped From Slavery Via Mail Express

04/19/2024 Bruce Strom 2

How did Henry Box Brown escape from slavery? Simple, in 1849 he “had himself boxed up and forwarded to Philadelphia direct by express.” The box was “made to fit him most comfortably,” it was “two feet eight inches deep, two feet wide, and three feet long.” With him were “one bladder of water and a few small biscuits,” with but one hole for breathing.
After he “entered his box, it was safely nailed up and hooped with five hickory hoops and was addressed” by a friend to William Johnson in Philadelphia marked, “This side up with care.” The box was transported right side up, but for many miles it was transported upside down, which “had him on his head for miles.” This box went from steamboat to wagon to railroad, the delivery time was a little more than a day. […]

Harriet Tubman, Conductor of Underground Railroad, Leading Many Slaves to Freedom
Civil War Memories

Harriet Tubman, Conductor of Underground Railroad, Leading Many Slaves to Freedom

03/01/2024 Bruce Strom 1

After spiriting so many slaves to freedom, a massive bounty of $40,000 was placed on Harriet Tubman’s head, which is equivalent to many hundreds of thousands in today’s money, enough to buy hundreds of slaves. If she had been caught, she likely would have been lashed with a hundred lashes bleeding out, she likely would have died from the punishment. She was bold, she would go to the market pretending to be an old woman, once she brushed past one of her former masters!
Before the Civil War, she made nineteen trips to Maryland to rescue more enslaved relatives, and slaves on other plantations. In this account she remembers she rescued three hundred souls from slavery, other accounts say less than a hundred. […]

Slavery Was Cause of Civil War SMALL
Civil War and Reconstruction

We Fought the Civil War to Preserve Slavery, Confederate Leaders Proclaimed

05/19/2023 Bruce Strom 2

The Confederate VP Stephens proclaimed:
“Our new government’s foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Stephens continues, “Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws” establishing slavery. “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner,’ the real ‘corner-stone,’ in our new edifice.” This is religious imagery, as Christ was proclaimed as the corner-stone of Christianity.

Furthermore, the Confederate VP Stephens proclaimed that the new Confederate “Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists among us, and the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” […]

Civil Rights

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, After Slavery as an Abolitionist

03/23/2022 Bruce Strom 8

Frederick Douglass remembers, “In the South I was a slave, thought of and spoken of as property,” as chattel, like talking livestock. “In the Northern states, a fugitive slave was hunted like a felon, to be hurled into the terrible jaws of slavery, doomed by an inveterate prejudice against color,” “shut out from cabins on steamboats, refused admission to respectable hotels, caricatured, scorned, scoffed, mocked and maltreated by anyone with a white skin.” […]