Originally published on December 30, 2019
Introduction
In late August 1825, a sloop sailed down the Delaware Bay from the port of Philadelphia, bound for the Indian River in southern Delaware. Chained in its hold were five young African-American boys, the eldest of whom was about fourteen.
They were being taken into slavery — kidnapped from the streets of Philadelphia, destined for the lower Mississippi River four months later. Their story is emblematic of what my guest Richard Bell calls the Reverse Underground Railroad, a network of criminals who kidnapped free African-Americans in the North and moved them South into the insatiable maw of the slave economy.
But unlike so many others, four of the kidnapped boys returned to the North. How they were taken, and how they returned, is the subject of Bell’s Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.
The Story of Stolen
Stolen uncovers not only the story of these boys, but the larger world of kidnapping rings that preyed on free Black communities in Northern cities. It sheds light on how the reach of slavery extended far beyond the South, revealing the terror and precariousness of Black life in antebellum America. And it traces the forgotten routes of the internal slave trade that funneled slaves from the Upper South (or from across the Mason-Dixon line, like those four boys) to the growing plantation economy of the deep South and across the Mississippi.
Published by Simon & Schuster in 2019, Stolen received the NEH Public Scholar Award and was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize.
About the Guest
Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He earned his PhD from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on American history between 1750 and 1877. Bell has also written about suicide in the early American republic and co-edited a volume on incarceration in early America.
Discuss
👉 How should stories like the Reverse Underground Railroad change our understanding of slavery in America? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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