Free Forbidden Fruit by Betty DeRamus Page B

between the North and South by discouraging
     slaves from leaving their masters. Supporters also hoped the law would stop Southern
     secessionists from threatening to leave the Union. However, the law accomplished just
     the opposite of what its supporters had hoped—more slaves than ever began running
     to Canada.
    “Almost every day we have men arriving here from the land of slavery,” Henry Bibb
     commented in the May 7, 1851, edition of his Canadian newspaper. Within a week, forty
     blacks left Boston. In Columbia, Pennsylvania, 487 of its 943 African Americans packed
     up and left. Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania, a northern Pennsylvania community once dubbed
     Liberia because it had accepted so many Southern runaways, lost so many people it
     disappeared from the map.
    Or as an antislavery tract issued in 1853 pointed out, “Families were broken up—churches
     disorganized—joy turned into mourning and laughter into tears.” In New Orleans, the
     situation became so laced with paranoia that a June 24, 1853, edition of the Liberator claimed a band of twenty-five hundred heavily armed slaves planned to attack the
     city. The story was quickly retracted.
    Runaways walked through woods, hid in hollow logs and coffins, crawled into unused
     pig pens and corn cribs and curled up under sacks of grain on ships; they crossed
     rivers in ships, tubs, gates or even logs; they rubbed their bodies with red pepper,
     raw onion and the dust from graves to baffle the hound dogs on their trail; and they
     ate raw meat to avoid setting cooking fires that would attract slave hunters. Some
     ran to swamps and bayous to live with Indians or as solitary outcasts.
    Meanwhile, the Crafts and other members of Boston’s antislavery movement began speaking
     with gruffer, angrier voices.
    On October 4, 1850, Boston blacks adopted a resolution to resist until death any attempt
     to snatch away their freedom. Ten days later, Josiah Quincy, former mayor of Boston,
     and 340 other white abolitionists, called a meeting to support this resolution. Abolitionist
     leader Frederick Douglass told the assembly, “We must be prepared should this law
     be put into operation to see the streets of Boston running with blood.”
    His words were soon tested.
    In mid-October, two slave hunters working for Ellen Craft’s owner, Robert Collins,
     showed up in Boston. John Knight, who once worked with William in a cabinetmaker’s
     shop, was one of the men. The Federal Union newspaper of Milledgeville, Georgia, described Knight as “a tall, lank, lean looking
     fellow, five feet ten or eleven inches high, dark hair, about twenty-eight years old.”
     He sent William a letter, asking him to come see him at the United States Hotel and
     show him around Boston. Knight tossed in an extra cup of sugar: he offered to take
     a letter from Ellen back to her mother, Maria.
    However, the Crafts learned that Knight was traveling with Willis Hughes, a jailer
     from Macon. There was nothing even remotely sweet about him. The November 5, 1850,
     edition of the Federal Union called him “a short, rowdyish-looking fellow, five feet two, thirty or forty years
     of age, sandy hair, red whiskers, black short teeth, chews and smokes.” A third professional
     slave catcher named Alfred Beal from Norfolk was also said to be in the area. He was,
     according to the newspaper, “a very stout, thick set, coarse looking man, about five
     feet nine inches high, sandy hair, red whiskers, upper front teeth broken off, about
     forty-five years of age, known to be on a general hunt.”
    Knight asked for a warrant for the Crafts’ arrest after the couple failed to show
     up at Knight’s hotel. On October 25, he finally found a judge to issue one. William
     barricaded himself inside a store owned by Lewis Hayden and guarded by blacks and
     abolitionists. He sat at his bench with a plane and saw and a heavily loaded “horse
     pistol,” prepared to shoot anyone who tried to carry him away.