'Stolen' Toward Civil War

Review by Bill Doughty

Kidnapped and taken aboard a boat in the Philadelphia Navy Yard nearly 200 years ago, a small boy was about to be taken on a harrowing trip with other free African Americans into the Deep South. They were to be sold as slaves. "They would have to fight like hell to try to escape."

Arch Street ferry, Philadelphia. Drawn, Engraved & Published by W. Birch Springland near Bristol Pennsylvania 1800. (Library Company of Philadelphia)

Richard Bell's "Stolen" (37 INK, Simon & Schuster; 2019) opens with this scene from August 1825:

"Cornelius Sinclair was ten years old and he was trapped. He was stuck in the belly of a small ship bobbing in the middle of the Delaware River, a mile south of Philadelphia. A man had grabbed him from a spot near that city's market an hour ago, shoved a black gag across his mouth, tossed him into a wagon, and hauled him here.It was dark below the waterline, but Cornelius could see enough to know that he was not alone. Four pairs of eyes stared back at him – four other black boys.Yesterday they had all been free. Today they were slaves, prisoners of a gang of child snatchers who planned to sell their lives and labor, most likely to plantation owners in the Deep South. If the boys' abductors got away with this, Cornelius would spend the rest of his life as someone else's property somewhere very far away. He would never see his family again."

"Stolen" is a heart-rending true tale of the ordeal of these young men. And it is also a story of the courage of civil servants, public officials, journalists and ordinary citizens to stand up against evil – and for justice. The story starts in the "sanctuary city" of Philadelphia, birthplace of the nation.

An 1840 painting of ships and boats on the Delaware River including large schooners, naval warships and rowboats as well as a paddle steamer. Twin ship sheds of the old Philadelphia Navy Yard are visible. Oil on canvas painting by Thomas Birch.

We follow the trail the kidnappers took with their "coffle" – chained or guarded caravan – as part of the Reverse Underground Railroad. We meet thieves, torturers, liars and murderers. And we confront the awful truth of how slavery was practiced, condoned and protected, not just in the South. The banal cruelty is almost unimaginable.

Although slavery was dying out in the North by 1825 (fewer than 20,000), just shy of fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, it was still going on in rural parts of New Jersey and New York. Yet it was still sanctioned in the states below the Mason-Dixon Line, including in Maryland and Delaware and especially farther south in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana (1.7 million souls).

Abolitionists and former slaves Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass

Bell recounts that some of the events in this narrative unfold in Dorchester County, Maryland, where slavery still flourished. "More than five thousand enslaved people lived in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1825, and two thousand more labored in fields and workshops just across the sate line in Sussex County, Delaware. Frederick Douglass (b. 1818) and Harriet Tubman (b. 1822) were among the many enslaved people to grow up around here..."

In the Deep South, some cotton farmers and sugarcane growers would gladly buy slaves from the North, few questions asked. As the United States expanded westward, the nation had to confront an expansion of slavery, including thousands who were kidnapped even as free Americans.

The book's subtitle is "Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home." The true story provides irony as slaveholders attempted to justify their inhumane practice. Some fought against the Reverse Underground Railroad from the North in order to protect the institution of "owning" other humans in the South and, they hoped, the West.

Pivotal moments in the destruction of the industry of slavery were of course the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Constitution, blueprints for liberty and equality. Other milestones were reached when President Jefferson and Congress abolished international slave trade in 1808; when Pennsylvania passed a new Personal Liberty Law in 1826; when the Supreme Court struck down in 1842 "states rights" opposition to civil rights; and when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.

"Stolen" unfolds in the middle of this cascading series of events that would soon lead to Civil War in 1861.

Bell makes a convincing case that the boys' ordeal was a spark that "advanced the cause of racial justice in America." He presents the story of the kidnapping and odyssey using court records, letters and newspaper sources. And he acknowledges his use of conjecture where there are blanks, couching his narrative with adverbs such as "likely," "probably," "surely" and "certainly."

Andrew Jackson

This book offers great maps, photos, art and artifacts to illustrate the story. Though not part of the "Stolen" story, Bell includes an engraving of slave owner Andrew Jackson: "A slave owner and speculator [who] traded enslaved adults and children across state lines for decades prior to his presidency, a fact that several of his opponents tried to exploit."

We come face to face with some of the morally bankrupt misanthropes involved in the kidnapping, torture and sale of thousands of human beings for profit.

But we also meet some heroic people, including lawyer John Henderson, Attorney General of Delaware James Rogers, civil servant Samuel Garrigues, and Mayor of Philadelphia Joseph Watson.

Watson was a man of earnest integrity: "He loathed con men who made their living bearing false witness," and "He had a loathing for liars and charlatans."

Mayor of Philadelphia Joseph Watson. (Unknown artist)

It was men and women like Watson and other abolitionist heroes – including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Highland Garnet – profiled in this book who took a stand and fought to end slavery.

When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 it outraged southern states. It was "so inflammatory that many historians record it as the single most significant cause of the Civil War."

At the end of the story we read about one of the boys who survived the ordeal for a time becoming a seaman for a time, heading out to sea in 1837, just before his 18th birthday. Missing in this book but included in other retellings of the history of the era is the role of the U.S. Navy, part of the Union military, in fighting and overcoming slavery.

While justice was not perfect in this or in many other cases, while reading this book, I kept thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.'s quote: "We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."