The Reverse Underground Railroad
The high demand for slaves, especially in the rice, cotton, and sugar plantations of the Deep South, led to the creation of the Reverse Underground Railroad, which operated until the end of the American Civil War. Demand increases value, and resulted in the kidnapping of free blacks and their transportation to the slave states of the Deep South for sale as slaves. Often slaves of the Border States were kidnapped as well and sent to other plantations further south. In New York and other eastern cities, kidnapping gangs known as blackbirders operated by either luring blacks or seizing them violently. Alcohol was a favorite means of placing an otherwise wary black man in a position to kidnap him.
It wasn’t only black men who were targeted, though they were the most valuable. In Philadelphia children were tempted to board vessels in the Delaware River with fruit and candy. They were then locked in the hold as the vessel got underway for a southern port. Before protective vigilance committees were formed to prevent the practice, hundreds of black children of Philadelphia were kidnapped in that manner. Philadelphia authorities began searching for kidnapping victims in the Deep South as early as the 1820s, with some successes and many more failures. New York authorities were less diligent searching for the victims of blackbirders.
Along the Ohio River kidnappers established a chain of stations similar to those moving escaped slaves to the North. In southern Illinois on the Saline River, an Ohio tributary, John Hart Crenshaw was twice indicted for kidnapping both escaped slaves and free blacks. In the first case the charges were dropped and in the second, in 1842, he was acquitted by a jury. The Crenshaw house was set up with a “slave jail” on the third floor, where he held them until moving them to points south and selling them as slaves. Crenshaw sold slaves in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and in the case for which he was acquitted, a woman and her children in Texas.
The Reverse Underground Railroad operated in the slave states as well as the North, kidnapping slaves who were traveling with a pass and moving them to stations furtively. If the kidnappers were at a high enough risk of being caught they had two options, convincing their pursuers that the slave in question had been trying to escape, or simply killing the slave. One such kidnapper (which southern laws called thieves since slaves were property) was John Murrell of Tennessee, who was convicted of slave-stealing in 1834. He was sentenced to ten years of prison.
In Eastern cities and the towns along the Ohio, including Cincinnati in free Ohio and Louisville in slave Kentucky, newspapers frequently ran advertisements seeking information on the whereabouts of missing slaves and free blacks, including children. Even during the years of the Civil War, when free blacks served in the Union Army, the Reverse Underground Railroad continued to send free blacks and former slaves into the Confederate states and slavery. It took the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to bring the Reverse Underground Railroad to an end in 1865.