Читать книгу Twelve Years a Slave - Solomon Northup - Страница 18

Corrupt Northern officials were sometimes engaged in kidnapping (for example, the so-called “Kidnapping Club” in New York City), but there were other cases where law enforcement officers went to great lengths to rescue victims and bring their abductors to justice.

In 1819, New York City constable John C. Gillen went undercover pretending to be interested in buying some African Americans to be shipped south and sold as slaves. In doing so, he made contact with the man who was in the process of tricking one Mary Underhill into going away, and whom he planned to sell as a slave. Gillen's efforts averted the kidnapping, and the potential kidnapper was tried and convicted.

In another case, two policemen from New York City went to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1858 in search of the couple who had received permission from a 14-year-old girl's mother to take her away from home. They had said she would work in a New Jersey household, but instead they took her to Washington, D.C. and tried to sell her. The transaction was averted when the girl raised a ruckus, and she was able to return home. Learning the whereabouts of the perpetrators, the policemen laid a trap: one impersonated a post office worker in order to identify the kidnappers when one of them came to collect his mail. He was hauled back to New York where he was put on trial and convicted.

On occasion, officials in the South actually intervened to save victims. In 1858, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia, Joseph Mayo, wrote to the mayor of New York City telling him of a young African American man, George Anderson, who claimed to be free, and whom Mayo believed had been kidnapped. The Southern mayor's information resulted in Anderson's rescue, and the apprehension and conviction of his kidnapper.

Although officials and anti-slavery organizations played roles in rescuing victims, numerous individual citizens undertook arduous trips to bring home the kidnapped and apprehend their kidnappers. The case of Eli Terry is remarkably similar to that of Northup. Terry had accepted a work opportunity, leaving Indiana with a white man. After the job was completed, his employer took him to Texas and sold him as a slave. It was years before friends in Indiana received information as to his whereabouts. But at the end of 1849, three men made the long journey (at one point they passed through Alexandria, Louisiana – putting them, unknowingly, within a few miles of Northup). After going to court, they got a judgment that Terry was a free man, and took him home.

A final case: Joshua Coffin traveled to Tennessee in 1838, in search of the kidnapped Isaac Wright. Finding Wright at his master's home, with the master away, Coffin got Wright onto a steamship and headed north. Wright was returned to his home in New York. Writing to an acquaintance, Coffin said: “I have in fact kidnapped him into freedom.” (10)