The Tilly Escape occurred in October 1856 when an enslaved woman, Tilly, was led by Harriet Tubman from slavery in Baltimore to safety in Philadelphia. Historians who have studied Tubman consider it "one of her most complicated and clever escape attempts." [1] It was a risky trip because Tubman and Tilly would not have been able to travel directly from Baltimore to Philadelphia without proof that they were free women. [2] In addition, local slave traders would have recognized strangers. [3] Tubman sought to evade capture by going south, before heading north, and using different modes of transportation over water and land. [3]
Into the 1850s, it was hard for Tubman to make trips between Maryland and Canada. She had health problems, which delayed travel. The trips required money. White slaveholders became increasingly agitated by the number of people fleeing slavery. And the plans required finding a good time to make a successful escape. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 meant that slave traders could travel into the northern, free states. [2] The law compelled people to help identify fugitive slaves. [4]
Tubman had coordinated the trip for Tilly with other plans, including helping five young men escape from the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Francis Molock, Cyrus Mitchell, Joshua Handy, Charles Dutton, and Ephraim Hudson), helping two children escape, and attempting to bring her sister Rachel and her children north, which was problematic after Rachel's children were sold and separated from her. [2]
Tilly's fiancé was a former slave who fled to Canada to avoid being sold in 1848 [1] [5] or 1849 and he had waited for Tilly to join him. [2] He asked Harriet Tubman to guide Tilly from Baltimore [1] and gave Tubman money for expenses. [2] Tubman arranged for a letter of passage from a steamboat captain in Philadelphia that identified her as a free woman from the city of brotherly love. [1] [3] She traveled on his steamship through the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal to Baltimore. [2] [6] With this letter, she was able to obtain a pass for Tilly from the captain of the steamboat for their travel from Baltimore. [1] [3] [a]
Tubman located Tilly in Baltimore and they traveled to Seaford, Delaware by a steamboat named Steamboat Kent. They traveled south through Chesapeake Bay for 40 mi (64 km) and then north-east via the Nanticoke River and landed in Seaford. [1] [7] [6] [b] They spent the night at the only hotel in town, [7] now the site of Gateway Park. A slave trader found them there, but Tubman showed him their passes and he let them go. [2] [c] She later recalled that she had prayed at the time, "Oh, Lord! You've been with me in six troubles, don't desert me in the seventh!" [2]
In point of courage, shrewdness, and disinterested exertions to rescue her fellow-men, by making personal visits to Maryland among the slaves, she was without her equal.
From Seaford, they walked eight miles north to Bridgeville [3] [8] and then traveled north to Camden by train. [1] [3] In Camden they met up with William Brinkley who was a free black man, an Underground Railroad conductor, and Tubman's friend. He took them on the 50 mi (80 km)-long journey to Wilmington. [2] In Wilmington, they went to the house of abolitionist and Underground Railroad leader Thomas Garrett. [1] [3] He gave Tubman $25 that had been sent for Tubman by Eliza Wigham. It was welcome relief as Tubman could use the money towards the expense of a rescue mission of her sister Rachel and her children, and both Tilly and Tubman needed new shoes. [2] They went on to Philadelphia, where Tilly's fiancé met up with them, likely at William Still's office. He was an Underground Railroad operator and a leading abolitionist. The couple traveled on to Canada and Tubman went back to Maryland and rescued a family of four. [5]
Mary Thompson Bayly placed an advertisement in the Baltimore Sun newspaper with a reward for the capture of "Laura" who had fled on the same day that Tilly ran away. Bayly and her father Dr. Anthony C. Thompson were known by Harriet Tubman's family and other people enslaved by Thompson. In 1839, Matilda and Laura were on Thompson's probate list. There is speculation that Matilda or Laura may have been Tilly. [6]
A historical marker about the Tilly escape site is located at the corner of North Market and High Streets at Gateway Park in Seaford. [1] [3] In September 2013, the site was made a location on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom by the National Park Service. [1] It is the only known escape where Tubman traveled the Nanticoke. [1]
The Underground Railroad was used by freedom seekers from slavery in the United States and was generally an organized network of secret routes and safe houses. Enslaved Africans and African Americans escaped from slavery as early as the 16th century and many of their escapes were unaided, but the network of safe houses operated by agents generally known as the Underground Railroad began to organize in the 1780s among Abolitionist Societies in the North. It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. The escapees sought primarily to escape into free states, and from there to Canada.
Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
William Still was an African-American abolitionist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a conductor of the Underground Railroad and was responsible for aiding and assisting at least 649 slaves to freedom. Still was also a businessman, writer, historian and civil rights activist. Before the American Civil War, Still was chairman of the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, named the Vigilant Association of Philadelphia. He directly aided fugitive slaves and also kept records of the people served in order to help families reunite.
The Pearl incident was the largest recorded nonviolent escape attempt by enslaved people in United States history. On April 15, 1848, seventy-seven slaves attempted to escape Washington, D.C. by sailing away on a schooner called The Pearl. Their plan was to sail south on the Potomac River, then north up the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River to the free state of New Jersey, a distance of nearly 225 miles (362 km). The attempt was organized by both abolitionist whites and free blacks, who expanded the plan to include many more enslaved people. Paul Jennings, a former slave who had served President James Madison, helped plan the escape.
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called freedom seekers to avoid implying that the enslaved person had committed a crime and that the slaveholder was the injured party.
Samuel Green was a slave, freedman, and minister of religion. A conductor of the Underground Railroad, he was tried and convicted in 1857 of possessing a copy of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe following the Dover Eight incident. He received a ten-year sentence, and was pardoned by the Governor of Maryland Augustus Bradford in 1862, after he served five years.
Thomas Garrett was an American abolitionist and leader in the Underground Railroad movement before the American Civil War. He helped more than 2,500 African Americans escape slavery.
The Cyrus Gates Farmstead is located in Maine, New York. Cyrus Gates was a cartographer and map maker for New York State, as well as an abolitionist. The great granddaughter of Cyrus-Louise Gates-Gunsalus has stated that from 1848 until the end of slavery in the United States in 1865, the Cyrus Gates Farmstead was a station or stop on the Underground Railroad. Its owners, Cyrus and Arabella Gates, were outspoken abolitionists as well as active and vital members of their community. Historian Shirley L. Woodward states that through those years escaped slaves came through the Gates' station.
Samuel D. Burris was a member of the Underground Railroad. He had a family, who he moved to Philadelphia for safety and traveled into Maryland and Delaware to guide freedom seekers north along the Underground Railroad to Pennsylvania.
Songs of the Underground Railroad were spiritual and work songs used during the early-to-mid 19th century in the United States to encourage and convey coded information to escaping slaves as they moved along the various Underground Railroad routes. As it was illegal in most slave states to teach slaves to read or write, songs were used to communicate messages and directions about when, where, and how to escape, and warned of dangers and obstacles along the route.
Mary Edmonson (1832–1853) and Emily Edmonson, "two respectable young women of light complexion", were African Americans who became celebrities in the United States abolitionist movement after gaining their freedom from slavery. On April 15, 1848, they were among the 77 slaves who tried to escape from Washington, D.C., on the schooner The Pearl to sail up the Chesapeake Bay to freedom in New Jersey.
The pre-American Civil War practice of kidnapping into slavery in the United States occurred in both free and slave states, and both fugitive slaves and free negroes were transported to slave markets and sold, often multiple times. There were also rewards for the return of fugitives. Three types of kidnapping methods were employed: physical abduction, inveiglement of free blacks, and apprehension of fugitives. The enslavement, or re-enslavement, of free blacks occurred for 85 years, from 1780 to 1865. Kidnapping of black children for resale was a consistent issue throughout the slavery period.
The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center is a visitors' center and history museum located on the grounds of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park in Church Creek, Maryland, in the United States. The state park is surrounded by the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, whose north side is bordered by the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park. Jointly created and managed by the National Park Service and Maryland Park Service, the visitor center opened on March 10, 2017.
Harriet Tubman's birthplace is in Dorchester County, Maryland. Araminta Ross, the daughter of Benjamin (Ben) and Harriet (Rit) Greene Ross, was born into slavery in 1822 in her father's cabin. It was located on the farm of Anthony Thompson at Peter's Neck, at the end of Harrisville Road, which is now part of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
Harriet Tubman (1822–1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Tubman escaped slavery and rescued approximately 70 enslaved people, including members of her family and friends. Harriet Tubman's family includes her birth family, her two husbands, John Tubman and Nelson Davis, and her adopted daughter, Gertie Davis.
The Dover Eight refers to a group of eight black people who escaped their slaveholders of the Bucktown, Maryland area around March 8, 1857. They were helped along the way by a number of people from the Underground Railroad, except for Thomas Otwell, who turned them in once they had made it north to Dover, Delaware. There, they were lured to the Dover jail with the intention of getting the $3,000 reward for the eight men. The Dover Eight escaped the jail and made it to Canada.
William Brinkley was a conductor on the Underground Railroad who helped more than 100 people achieve freedom by traveling from Camden, Delaware, past the "notoriously dangerous" towns of Dover and Smyrna north to Blackbird and sometimes as far as Wilmington, which was also very dangerous for runaway enslaved people. Some of his key rescues include the Tilly Escape of 1856, the Dover Eight in the spring of 1857, and the rescue of 28 people, more than half of which were children, from Dorchester County, Maryland. He had a number of pathways that he would take to various destinations, aided by his brother Nathaniel and Abraham Gibbs, other conductors on the railroad.
A group of 28 enslaved people from Maryland escaped their slaveholders on October 24, 1857. They were a group of two dozen enslaved men, women, and children who fled from Dorchester County, Maryland. Four men joined their group to travel north along the Underground Railroad.