History Conversations REWIND | Flee North

Scott Shane’s Flee North tells a very local tale of both tragedy and triumph. It unearths the lost story of Thomas Smallwood, born into slavery, who bought his freedom, educated himself, and became a shoemaker in Southeast Washington, a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. In 1842, Smallwood began to organize mass escapes from slavery by the wagonload, with the help of a young white partner, Charles Torrey — and wrote about the escapes in extraordinary satirical dispatches for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany, New York. It was Smallwood, Scott Shane discovered, who gave the underground railroad its name. But Smallwood’s daring operation took place against the very dark background of the domestic slave trade, which thrived on Washington’s mall and at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, shipping thousands of people every year away from their families to the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South. The book’s third major character, Baltimore’s Hope Slatter, was the era’s dominant slave trader, operating from his private “slave jail” near the city’s harbor. The domestic slave trade, still too little understood, became an engine driving the underground railroad. Originally presented at the 2024 Montgomery County History Conference.