The Film: Interview Transcripts: Loren Schweninger

Loren Schweninger, Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, on
dramatic slave escapes
By the time he was 11 years old, a Tennessee slave named Nathan was already what was called a perpetual or a habitual runaway.  He kept running away and running away.  He was sent to a man who was supposed to know how to deal with younger slaves who ran away often, and the man, whose name was Grisham, wrote a letter back to the owner saying what happened, and in that letter, he explained that at first, he tried to reason with Nathan, but Nathan ran away.  When he came back, he tried corporal punishment, but Nathan ran away again and came back.  He was captured and brought back again, and this time Grisham, himself, had to go out and find Nathan.  It took him three days on one occasion; the third time he put a chain on Nathan’s wrist and a collar around Nathan’s neck yet somehow, he got away a third time, and it was then that Nathan was sent back to his original owner.  All this information came from a court case involving a contract that the owner said that Grisham had with her to discipline the slave. It said the slave was not disciplined and was not broken of the habit of running away. 

These kinds of stories of children, of women, of pregnant women, of mothers, of fathers, seeking loved ones are all part of this evidence that is accurate, that is succinct, and people didn’t have reason to falsify. 

In 1834, two slaves in Nashville, Tennessee changed owners.  Sally Thomas, and her son, Henry.  Sally was fearful that her son would be sold away from her and sold to the deep south, and she urged him to try to escape.  He fled across Tennessee and into Kentucky.  He made it all the way to the Ohio line when he was captured in Louisville and jailed.  The night he was captured, he was able to get out of jail, made it to the river, stole a boat and sculled over the falls of the Ohio River and made it to freedom.  He was chained by the wrists when he went over the falls, but he still made it.  Later, his mother would learn that he had settled in Buffalo, New York.  She would never see him again.  She died in the cholera epidemic of 1850 in Nashville, but she knew that he was living in freedom.  In 1852, he moved from Buffalo to Canada following the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law, fearing that an owner would come and claim him and take him back to the south.

Joseph Taper was a remarkable man -- a slave in Virginia who escaped to Pennsylvania, who read his own fugitive slave notice in a newspaper in Pennsylvania, who then feared that he would be captured and returned to slavery and took his family to Canada.  When he arrived in Canada, he wrote back to a friend in Virginia and told about what Canada meant to him. It meant freedom from fear of being captured and returned to bondage.  Freedom from fear that his children and his wife would be punished and harshly treated.  That he was able to acquire his own property, that he was able to work for a living, that he was able to own livestock and own other.  That he was able to send his children to school.  What the meaning of earning your own living must have meant to a slave whose all of his labor went to the master’s property, must have been a remarkable feeling. 

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slavery’s long shadow