Thomas Smallwood and the Underground Railroad

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock.I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. On February 22, 1801, a boy named Thomas Smallwood was born into slavery in Prince George's County, Maryland. As is so often the case in stories of enslaved people, we don't know anything about Thomas' parents. What we do know is that Thomas and his sister Catherine, when they were still children, were bequeathed to a woman named Sarah Ferguson and her children. In 1808, Sarah married a Methodist minister, her cousin, named John Bell Ferguson. John Ferguson disapproved of slavery, but the terms of the inheritance meant that he could not outright emancipate Smallwood. What he did instead was to purchase Thomas Smallwood from Sarah and his stepchildren for $500. He then allowed Smallwood to work off that $500, going so far as to file a document in the Prince George's County Courthouse, saying that he would, "release from slavery, manumit, and set free Smallwood upon his 30th birthday." John and Sarah Ferguson taught Smallwood to read. When he was hired out to a Scottish educator named John McLeod, Smallwood furthered his education, learning poetry, literature, and philosophy from McLeod and his family. In his 20s, Smallwood embraced the ideas of the American Colonisation Society, which advocated for the emigration of free Black people from the United States, to somewhere where they could experience less racism. Possibly it's the new colony of Liberia in West Africa. However, over time, Smallwood came to oppose colonization, realizing that the hidden motivation of the ACS was to rid the United States of the free Black population, making the enslaved population less likely to try to escape. Instead, Smallwood turned his attention to helping enslaved people escape. First though, Smallwood gained his freedom, and married a free Black woman named Elizabeth Anderson. Together, they had five children, the first of whom, also named Thomas, was born just months after Smallwood was officially emancipated. In southeast Washington, DC, Smallwood opened a shoemaking and shoe repair business, and he worshiped in a local Methodist church, where he also studied in an adult education program. Early in 1842, Elizabeth Smallwood, who worked as a laundress for a boarding house, introduced Thomas to one of the residents of that boarding house, a New England educated abolitionist, named Charles Torrey, who was 13 years younger than Smallwood, and who had just recently been arrested when he attended a slaveholders' convention in Annapolis, Maryland, in the guise of a reporter, to spy for the abolition movement. According to his memoir, Smallwood, started helping enslaved people escape, even before he met Torrey, but with Torrey's help, he was able to do so much more ambitiously. Smallwood had the local knowledge and the access to enslaved communities, while Torrey had knowledge and connections in the north, along with sources of funding and publication. In the spring of 1842, the pair helped Elizabeth Castle and her young daughter, along with Polly, Mariana, John Weston and Charles Stewart, all escape from the Baltimore home of the wealthy and distinguished merchant, Robert Gilmor,Jr, and then they sent a report of that escape to Torrey's contacts in the north, boldly publicizing the feat in the "Tocsin of Liberty" newspaper in Albany, New York, to embarrass Robert Gilmor. As they continued to help wagon loads of enslaved people flee the DC and Baltimore area, Smallwood began to write the newspaper dispatches himself, delighting in needling the enslavers, although waiting until the escapees were safely in Canada to do so. It was in one of these dispatches, in August, 1842, writing under the pen name, Samivel Weller, Jr, Smallwood gave their escape enterprise a name, calling it "an underground railroad." By October, 1842, it was no longer safe for Torrey to remain in Baltimore, and he moved to Albany, doing what he could to help from afar, and taking over the editing of the "Tocsin of Liberty." Smallwood, whose abolition work was less visible than Torrey's, continued to operate the Underground Railroad. By the spring of 1843, they estimated that they had enabled the escapes of around 400 enslaved people in the area. By June of 1843, Smallwood no longer felt that he was safe in the south, and he moved with his family to Toronto. But he couldn't resist the pull of one last rescue attempt to help the families of four men in Toronto who had escaped slavery, but who had to leave their families behind. Sadly, the authorities had been tipped off and prevented the escape plans. Smallwood and Torrey were barely able to escape themselves. Smallwood fled to Toronto for good this time, where he operated sawmill and later worked as a bricklayer. Torrey, though, stayed in the south, continuing to work to free enslaved people, despite the conspicuousness of a white man meeting with enslaved Black people. In June of 1844, Torrey's increasingly risky work caught up with him, and he was arrested in Baltimore, and charged with three counts of stealing slaves. After trying and failing to challenge the constitutionality of slavery, Torrey unsuccessfully attempted to escape jail in September of that year. In December, he was convicted. His sentence was six years in the penitentiary. Torrey had been battling tuberculosis for years, and the conditions in the penitentiary exacerbated his illness. Torrey's supporters finally convinced the Maryland governor to pardon him, but it was too late. Torrey died the very same day that the pardon letter arrived at the prison, May 8, 1846. His body was taken to Boston were abolitionists gave him a huge funeral. In 1851, Smallwood, still living in Toronto, published his memoir. Thomas Smallwood died in Toronto on May 10, 1883, at 82 years old. Joining me now to discuss Thomas Smallwood, Charles Torrey, and the Underground Railroad, is journalist Scott Shane, author of, "Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderlands."

Hi, Scott, thanks so much for joining me today.

Scott Shane  10:48  
Thanks for having me on.

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:49  
Yes, I'm really excited to talk about Thomas Smallwood and Charles Torrey and the Underground Railroad. What, uh, hear a little bit about how you got started on writing this book, because this is very different than the kind of reporting you were doing at the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times.

Scott Shane  11:04  
Absolutely. Yeah, for 15 years, I'd covered national security, terrorism and counterterrorism, the CIA and so on for the New York Times. But many years earlier, I guess it was back in the late 90s, having lived in Baltimore for a long time, I stumbled across the fact that there had been a thriving slave trade at the at Baltimore's Inner Harbor. And for those who haven't been there, the Inner Harbor is touristy, very pleasant to sort of stroll around and look at boats and go to an aquarium and buy ice cream. And I was just kind of shocked and horrified by the idea that as I looked into it, people had been purchased from plantations and farms around Maryland, incarcerated in what they called slave jails, private slave traders' jails, around the harbor, and then shipped south, usually to New Orleans, where they would be sold off to the highest bidder into the cotton trade, sugar trade, and often separated from everyone and everything they'd ever known. People, you know, were routinely separated, husbands from wives, children from parents, siblings. So it was, as I learned more, I learned that a million people had been forcibly moved south, most of them through the domestic slave trade. And I still find to this day that even my very sophisticated, well educated colleagues at the New York Times, for example, if you say domestic slave trade, they don't really understand that this was a massive phenomenon that took place over the first half of the 19th century, and, you know, was actually larger in scale than the middle passage to the United States from Africa. So I kind of wanted to return to that. I wrote it, I wrote about that for the Baltimore Sun. But I always wanted to return to that subject. And so in 2020, of course, the pandemic was on and I was looking around for a story I could tell, a nonfiction story I could tell from the domestic slave trade, the idea being to write a story that people would want to read, but would also introduce them to this phenomenon, which I thought was just had not gotten enough attention, certainly in my education. And I found it difficult because virtually all the people being sold south were illiterate, and left little in the way of records of of their travels, and their fate in the Deep South. And the slave traders themselves weren't illiterate, but hardly literary and didn't leave much in the way of journals and correspondence and so on. But as I poked around, I also had heard about a guy named Charles Torrey, who had died in the Maryland penitentiary after being locked up for helping people escape slavery. So I sort of broadened my, my research. And I discovered that this guy, Torrey had worked, he was a white guy from New England, and he'd worked with an older Black man from Washington, DC named Thomas Smallwood. And in the relatively few sources that talked about Torrey, if they mentioned Smallwood at all, they would usually sort of treat Thomas Smallwood as Torrey's Black sidekick. But the more I looked into it, the more I began to realize that it was really the other way around, and that Thomas Smallwood was an extraordinary activist and writer, and really virtually lost to history. You can find very little about him. In fact, I just as an exercise, I asked ChatGPT recently, "Who was Thomas Smallwood?" And even though this thing had presumably ingested the entire internet, ChatGPT was stumped and said, "I can't find anyone of any prominence named Thomas Smallwood."

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:42  
So let's talk a little bit about Thomas Smallwood and Charles Torrey. They're so very different in their upbringing and where they're coming from, and yet they come together to do this very important work.

Scott Shane  15:56  
Smallwood was born into slavery in 1801, in Bladensburg, Maryland, right outside DC. And he had the very good luck to be inherited by a woman who then married a man named John Ferguson, who was a preacher and fairly anti slavery, and arranged for, because of sort of technicalities of his wife's will, he was unable to free Smallwood outright. But he promised Smallwood, when he was 15 that he would free him at age 30. And he did that, but Smallwood paid him $500, over time, which was what John Ferguson had had to pay his wife and her children from a previous marriage. So Smallwood by age 30 was, was free and clear, and kind of making his way in the world. He apparently taught himself shoemaking and set up a shoe making business. He married. By the time we're talking about, he had four kids, eventually they have five. And he had experienced slavery, he had friends in slavery. And he gradually, as he sort of came of age politically, began to contemplate, you know, what could be done about what he saw as this basically crime against humanity that surrounded him. Washington, DC was, of course, enslaved country, Maryland was a slave state, Virginia was a slave state. So he began to think about how he could take this on. And about that time in 18, early 1842, he made the acquaintance of this young guy, Charles Torrey, a white guy from New England, who was active in the abolitionist movement, which was, at that time, sort of centered in New England. But Torrey had, he was in his late 20s, he had failed essentially, at teaching and preaching, and then got very caught up in the anti slavery movement. He had a wife and two kids who he was not doing a very good job of supporting. But he, he had the idea of becoming a correspondent for abolitionist newspapers, in Washington, so he would cover all the debates and and in Congress, surrounding issues related to slavery. But very quickly, he did a little bit of that, but very quickly, he, he too, was sort of thinking about how could he take direct action against slavery. And so the two of them met somewhat randomly. Smallwood had heard about Torrey, and it just happened that Smallwood's wife did the laundry for Torrey's boarding house. And so he asked his wife, "Would you introduce me to this guy?" The two of them, hit it off despite extraordinarily different backgrounds. Torrey had gone to Exeter and Yale, and Smallwood had educated himself with the help of a few sort of patrons. But they had reached a similar point in terms of being tired of talking about slavery, and wanting to just do something about it. So together, they began to organize escapes from slavery in Washington, in Baltimore, the much larger city to the north, and from some of the surrounding sort of suburban counties around Washington and Baltimore. There were a couple of things that were unusual about this effort, of course, people were trying to flee slave slavery for, you know, for the whole existence of slavery. But they would sometimes approach people, Smallwood basically would approach people and say, "You have any interest in running, running north?" So he would actually instigate it. And also, they tried when they could to help people escape not by ones and twos and threes, but by wagon loads. So they would hire a wagon, or buy an old wagon, hire horses often, and anyway, try to get people away 10, 15, even 20 at a time. And this started through through 1842. At some point, Charles Torrey moves to Albany, and becomes editor of the abolitionist paper there, and Smallwood continues this operation on his own. And, you know, what, sort of floored me as I looked into this was discovering that Smallwood had not only run his business as a shoemaker, not only had been father to four young kids, but also managed somehow to find time to write these dispatches to this abolitionist paper in Albany, which initially was called, "Tocsin, of Liberty," t o c s i n, tocsin being an old word for bells or bell of liberty. And he would send a report, essentially kind of a report from the field on the escapes every week or two. And he wrote these things under a pseudonym that he took from Charles Dickens, because, of course, everything he was doing was illegal. And it was an extremely dangerous operation. But he used the real names of the people escaping and their enslavers, and gave some insight into the escapes. But the goal of these pieces was really to ridicule and mock the slaveholders, and essentially, celebrate and ennoble, the people escaping. So a sort of turning the tables on the usual arrangement of slavery.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:27  
Yeah, so can I ask a little bit about the this is not what most abolitionists at the time were doing. Most of them were not going into the south and helping people escape and, and presumably, some of them, were not happy about this idea of putting these dispatches in the newspaper and sort of rubbing people's noses in these these escapes. Could you talk a little bit about that? Like what, what were the dangers of doing this, not just for the individuals, not just for Smallwood and Torrey, but the larger danger?

Scott Shane  22:58  
Well, as I mentioned, the abolitionist movement was very much centered in the north, in fact, way in the north in New England. And, you know, a lot of it was people getting together, abolitionist societies had become very popular, popped up in many towns in the north, in the 1830s. And basically, people would get together and take turns saying how much they hated slavery and how terrible slavery was, and debate strategies. But even among abolitionists, there were very mixed feelings about encouraging escapes or assisting escapes, because there was, you know, sort of the traditional American belief in private property and property rights. And some anti slavery activists even believed that it was wrong to steal, in effect, the property of the slaveholders even if slavery was a crime, that would be another crime. And that slaveholders should be compensated for their property. And therefore, there were efforts to buy the freedom of people enslaved in the southern states in the border states. But it was very controversial, to just go to and say to people, "Run for your life, run north." And I think Torrey and Smallwood had actually been influenced by a very controversial speech that had been given by a wealthy New York anti slavery activist and philanthropist named Gerrit Smith. And, you know, what was controversy about this, "address to the slaves," as he called it, was basically he said, "You have every right to run. You should run if you get an opportunity to run, run, and don't have any hesitation to you know, take your enslaver's  horse or boat or whatever you need food, you know, whatever you need for the journey. You're enslaver has been stealing your labor for a long time. And it's, you know, it's payback time." But that was a very controversial stance at the time. And also, this was completely illegal. It was illegal to run from slavery if you were enslaved. And it was particularly prohibited to entice or assist, though, you know, under Maryland law, which also applied in DC, it was highly illegal to do anything to encourage or assist someone in fleeing slavery. So these guys were, were violating the law. And then, you know, it's sort of compounded their daring, for Smallwood to then be writing about these escapes. And as far as I can tell, this is perhaps the only but certainly an extremely rare, sort of running real time account of escapes from slavery. There are many people who wrote about escapes, years later. But in this case, you know, this guy was, he Smallwood was operating in, you know, on deadline, essentially, and sometimes would have would withhold a dispatch, until he'd had word that the people he was writing about, had made their way all the way north. And usually they were crossing into Canada. And Smallwood encouraged them to go to Canada, didn't think it was safe to stop anywhere on US territory. And so when he got word that somebody was in Toronto, or somebody was somewhere in Canada, he would feel comfortable writing about the escapes in these newspaper dispatches. But again, not everybody in the abolition world, thought it was a great idea to brag about, essentially these escapes that you were assisting with, even if Smallwood was not portraying or admitting his own role in these escapes. He was usually sort of forming these letters posing as, as a guy who was sort of comforting the enslavers in a way, you know, "We're so sorry to hear about how, you know, your slave, Polly Jones has gone missing, you know. You might look for her on the other side of the great Ontario," as he put it, Lake Ontario. So he wasn't exactly you know, giving away his, you know, the tricks of his escape the routes, they were taking the means of transport, but he was calling attention to the escapes. And Frederick Douglass among others, thought this was a very bad idea. And he has a passage in one of his autobiographies where he sort of denounces the practice of recording or, you know, offering public accounts of escapes, saying that that could only sort of put the slaveholders on guard and, you know, sort of increase their efforts to police and restrict the people that they enslaved.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:25  
Yeah. Can we talk some about the methods? You mentioned earlier, they would try to do like whole wagonfuls of people at a time. How were they actually, how were Smallwood, Torrey, and the people helping them actually getting them out of DC and Baltimore, and all the way up to Canada?

Scott Shane  28:43  
Yeah, I mean, some of this Smallwood describes in a short but very interesting memoir that he published years later, in 1851. We're talking about, you know, these escapes are taking place in the early 1840s. But even in the memoir, he leaves out a lot of the detail. And, you know, of course, it was still very much, you know, the slavery era. And so he I think he was reluctant, even then to lay everything out in great detail. But from what he wrote in his dispatches, from what he wrote in his memoir, and from what Torrey wrote, from time to time, you can kind of piece it together. So they would obtain a wagon, from somewhere, either rent it, buy it, borrow it, get a team of horses. They would pack the wagon, with as many people as you know, as they could, as they had recruited for the trip. And that in itself, you know, was quite a project if you think about it. As a white man, Torrey was not really in any position to be talking to random enslaved Black people without raising suspicions. Smallwood was in a much better position to do that. He went to church with a lot of enslaved people. He knew them from the neighborhood, he knew them from, you know, various social connections. And he also had this shoemaking business, which would give him cover to stop by and say, "I was talking to him about, you know, a new pair of boots or something." And so, you know, they would, Smallwood for the most part would approach a dozen or more people. And, you know, they would be scattered around town or even a larger area. But they'd have to designate a particular night, when they could slip away from their enslavers and gather at a particular spot. And sometimes that spot was just a desolate road somewhere where Smallwood or somebody working with him would, would have the wagon. Sometimes it was a barn where they could actually load the people into the wagon, a little more discreetly. And so everybody would gather, and they would take off north, always traveling at night. He talks about having two essentially stops: one, what appears to be somewhere between Baltimore and Washington, the next seems to be in Baltimore, right around Baltimore. And on the third night, if they were leaving DC on the third night, they could usually cross the Susquehanna River, which was the big kind of geographical barrier, big, big, broad river and cross the Pennsylvania line. And there they connected apparently with Quakers, who were numerous in that part of Pennsylvania and who were, in many cases, strongly anti slavery and happy to help hide people or help transport them. Their route then usually appears to have gone in most cases through Philadelphia, which was a hotbed of abolitionism. And where there were lots of people to help, and then on on, you know, basically standard commercial transport north by train, often by train to New York City, then by steamboat up the Hudson River to Albany, and beyond. And then from there, there were there are multiple routes, either by land or by water, to reach Canada. Some people, of course, stopped in Northern New York, where Harriet Tubman would would live in a later era. But Smallwood was always, quite shrewdly, I think, it seems in retrospect, adamant that people try to get to Canada. Canada was, of course, part of the British Empire, and they had abolished slavery in 1833. So and you course, you're, you're in another country across the international border, there were occasionally slave catchers, slave catching police officers, who would actually go all the way into Canada too, looking for people who had escaped to grab them and drag them back into slavery. But that was pretty rare. Once you got to Canada, you're pretty safe. And that was essentially Smallwood's advice and policy.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:37  
So it's probably obvious to people why people who were enslaved would want to escape. What were some of the reasons that they often didn't try to escape? Like, what what was the risk besides just getting back into slavery if they were caught?

Scott Shane  33:50  
Well, you know, one of the things that I gradually came to realize in writing this book and researching the book and then writing it, and it took me a while to understand this, is that the Underground Railroad as it came to be called, the escapes from slavery, were very tied up with the domestic slave trade. So, and Smallwood, in fact, in his memoir, remarks on this, that many of the people who came to him seeking help fleeing north because as time passed, as the months passed, his name got out there and among the enslaved, and people started coming to him more and more and saying, you know, "Can you help me get out of here?" And he remarks that many, in many cases, the reason they have suddenly decided to risk running north, is it they've suddenly learned or had reason to believe that they might be sold south. So it might be that their enslaver was short of cash, and if he didn't do it, you know he was broke. And in those days, slaveholders would sometimes say, especially in that region, the Mid Atlantic, they would say, "You better work hard, or I'll put you in my pocket," by which they meant they would summon the slave trader, and have the person hauled off and collect 400, 500, $600 for that person, who would be sold for a higher price in the deep south by the slave trader. If an enslaver was dying, on his deathbed, or had just died, you know, that was a time when the enslaved had to be, you know, keenly aware that they might be scattered, they might be sold, that they might be separated from family. So again, that was, you know, if they got wind, or even sometimes, the slaveholder would say, "I'm gonna sell you," you know, and so, all of that, you know, would encourage somebody to, you know, kind of get up the nerve, to attempt to flee. And, of course, if you had somebody like Smallwood helping you, with a network of allies and network of safe houses, it was a heck of a lot easier than just setting out on your own with no compass, with not necessarily much knowledge of the roads, or the routes, you know, so it really helped to have assistance. But so the, you know, the, the possibility of sale was often the motivator to run north. The great irony was that if you were caught fleeing north, and that was a very common circumstance, because any white person, certainly a white police officer, a night watchman, you know, could challenge any Black person to basically, you know, who are you and where are you going, and even, you know, sort of busy bodied, ordinary white citizens would do that. And, you know, challenge, there was a lot of fear about especially after Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia in 1831, the white people would be on, you know, on alert against the, you know, Black people either gathering, police were often breaking up Black social gatherings of any kind. So there was this kind of paranoia on the part of the white population, and the slaveholding population. And so it was not uncommon for somebody who struck out north, especially on their own, to be grabbed by somebody, taken to jail usually, and either they would admit their enslaved status and who their enslaver was, or sometimes they would be sold south, you know, from the jail. And, in fact, my third character in the book, other than Thomas Smallwood who was really the central character, and Charles Torrey, his helper, is the leading slave trader of the era in that region, a guy named Hope Slatter with the ironic name Hope, and Hope Slatter sold people from Baltimore's Inner Harbor for about 10 years or so, actually a little more than 10 years, and sort of dominated the trade. And he a one, one source of, you know, human beings that he could sell for him was the Baltimore City Jail. There was something called the runaway docket, which was basically anyone caught fleeing slavery or suspected of fleeing slavery, would be written down on the runaway docket and kept in Baltimore City Jail, while they tried to ascertain while the jailers basically tried to ascertain, what was this person's identity, are they you know, giving their real name? Who owned them? You know, what, and what did that enslaver want to do about it? And in many, many cases, the slaveholder having discovered that the enslaved the person they enslaved their servant, had run for Pennsylvania, would understandably be wary that that might happen again, and that they might be out a tremendous amount of of money, because for most slaveholders, the people they owned was by far the largest part of their wealth. You know, I kind of very roughly estimate that the value of a slave was comparable to the value of a house in those days. Of course, the value of of the enslaved varied greatly by age and gender and so on the way, the value of houses varied. But you know, in other words, there's a real chunk of change. And, you know, so rather than risk losing this person and being completely out of all that value, the enslaver at that point might tell the jailers, "I want to sell this guy," and so Hope Slatter would come by the jail on a regular basis or send his people, and they would buy folks from their enslavers and take them from the city jail, to Slatter's private jail, which was a couple blocks from Inner Harbor. And there Slatter would accumulate, you know, 40, 50, 60, 80 people and put them aboard a ship to New Orleans. So, you know, the great irony here is that you are afraid you might be in danger of being sold, you run to avoid that possibility, you get captured, and you then you are sold as a result. You know, I've I've just been very struck by the sort of existential predicament of anybody in slavery, in the mid Atlantic, in the border region, same thing's true, really of Kentucky, that you lived every day with the possibility that you're going to be sold away from your loved ones. And sometimes this happens with absolutely no warning, you know, just some, somebody shows up and puts shackles on you, and carts you away, you know, often with no time to even say goodbye to your family. You know, so they lived every day with that possibility. They everybody in slavery knew people to whom that was happening. It was a very common phenomenon. It was the talk of the slave, the enslaved community. But at the same time, if you were in Maryland, or even Virginia, you learned that Pennsylvania, a free state was not that far away, so that your chance of making it was far, far greater than if you were enslaved in you know, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana. And so, you know, I imagined these folks, very much, you know, caught between these two possibilities. And that's sort of how they lived their lives. And I was very struck by, you know, just the, the, the map that we're talking about here of people being shipped south and people running north. And the way these two phenomena are, are sort of interlinked in ways that I really had not understood.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:49  
I want to ask you a little bit about your methodology. I saw on your website that you've thought about sort of the differences between doing history and doing journalism. I wonder if you could reflect on that a little bit, and the ways that what you were doing for this book were different than what you had done in your career, but also the ways that there's some similarities?

Scott Shane  43:10  
Yeah, that's such an interesting question for me. I've always liked history, I've always read history. But this is the first time I've written about, you know, distant history. I suppose every time you write journalism, you're writing about things that have already happened. But it was always recent history. Occasionally, I would slip in a historical story for either the Baltimore Sun or later on the New York Times. I did write about the slave trade at the Baltimore's Inner Harbor. And, and I think my I kind of remember my bosses sort of rolling their eyes at the proposal, and reminding me that we are a newspaper. But hey, if people don't know it, and it's important, it's it's news, right? History is news that stays news. So, you know, when I embarked on this, I was, I was certainly used to working with documents as a journalist, but not usually documents from the 1840s. I have to say that this book would have been impossible without the incredible tools that have been created in relatively recent years. These online newspaper collections where you can, you know, put a keyword in, put a name in and find all kinds of articles about either a topic or a person if they're of any prominence. And, you know, while Smallwood's dispatches were not in the big newspaper collections, in those days, as you know, it was so common to just for one paper to copy the contents from another paper, just everyone was trading or stealing stories. And so many of his dispatches were picked up by other papers, often bigger papers that were in, you know, are covered by newspapers.com and genealogybank.com, which were two of the big collections I used. So, you know, that was the way I got an awful lot of material. In addition, I use the National Archives Library of Congress, lots of state historical societies. And generally speaking, I had, you know, had some trouble because it was the pandemic, and a lot of archives were closed. But I was very fortunate in getting the support of winning over usually by phone or by email, librarians, and archivists who, you know, sympathized with my plight and would go into their records and sometimes digitize a document, photograph it and send me the image. So, you know, the big difference from journalism is, of course, one thing is that I could not give Thomas Smallwood a call and ask him to reminisce. You know, I couldn't confront hope Slatter at his slave jail on the Baltimore Harbor, and say, "Hey, tell me about what you're up to here?" and get thrown out. You know, I'm accustomed to as a journalist, to people refusing to talk to me, but not being unable to talk to me for biological reasons, so to speak. And I guess the other thing is, as a journalist, particularly national security, you often know, there's a document, but it may be classified, and may be out of reach, and so you're always sort of scheming to get somebody to share sensitive documents and help you out. I kind of had to, I did make a lot of discoveries in the archives and in the old newspapers, but I had to face the fact that there might be holes in my research that I just could not fill. You know, hopefully, people will pick up on Thomas Smallwood, others will keep working on Thomas Smallwood and put some of the other pieces of his life together. For example, he says nothing, not a word about his parents, in any of his writings, and I was unable to trace him with any degree of, of confidence into the world of slavery in Prince George's County outside of DC, or to Charles County, another Maryland county to the south, where most of the Smallwoods, white and Black, came from. But you know, that may be doable, and perhaps by somebody who's more experienced and adept at the very specialized skill of tracing people back, the enslaved back, you know, through the decades of slavery than I am. So I hope that might still happen. And I'll be fascinated what folks find out. But it's, you know, it's kind of an acquired skill, but it does have a big overlap with journalism, in terms of, you know, finding the voices of people, whether it's on the telephone, or perhaps in a newspaper, is story from 1842, and working with documents and trying to make sense of them and trying to really sort of study them for the clues that they may give you to what happened.

Kelly Therese Pollock  48:51  
So there are many, many stories in this book that we're not going to talk about right now for matter of time. So people should go read the book. Can you tell people how to get a copy?

Scott Shane  49:01  
You know, they should be able to get a copy anytime after September 19, from any of the big online booksellers, or, you know, hopefully, from your friendly, independent bookstore, if you got one. It shouldn't be hard to find. So I hope people enjoy the read and learn something, because I certainly did writing it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  49:25  
And once all of the Hollywood strikes are over, someone should make a movie of this.

Scott Shane  49:31  
Yeah, you know, several people who've been early readers have said that, and I must say, I get, you know, not to give away too much anything, but Smallwood eventually has to make his own escape, because things get a little too hot for him, as people might expect, you know, organizing mass escapes from slavery and then writing about it. Eventually, you know, he is essentially found out and has to make his own escape, and I still get sort of excited reading about how he got away. So, you know, hope people enjoy this and I hope maybe there's a Hollywood producer out there who will one of these days give Thomas Smallwood his due.

Kelly Therese Pollock  50:12  
Is there anything else you wanted to make? Sure we talked about?

Scott Shane  50:15  
One of the fun surprises of my research into Thomas Smallwood's newspaper dispatches was to come across what looks like the first use uses of the term Underground Railroad for escapes from slavery. And the way Smallwood describes it, there was a Baltimore cop, police constable who is somewhat notorious as a slave catcher, he made a lot of his money running after and catching and returning people who were escaping slavery in, you know, from the Baltimore area. And he began to be quite frustrated and baffled by the number of people who were getting away by means that he could not understand. And of course, Smallwood had a hand in this. So he heard that this guy whose name is John Zell, this constable, was heard essentially sort of cursing his fate expressing exasperation, that he couldn't figure out how people were getting away, and they must be getting away "by underground railroad or a steam balloon." And, of course, that was those were non existent forms of transport. And there were no underground railroads at the time. So he was essentially saying, you know, they must have been abducted by aliens, or they must have teleported themselves to you know, Canada or something, because I sure can't find them. So in a way, it was a backhanded compliment to Smallwood and Smallwood very much embraced it and began writing in these newspaper dispatches about how, "Yeah, so and so got away on the Underground Railroad," and addressing slaveholders and urging them to go to the offices of the Underground Railroad in Washington, which of course did not exist, to inquire after what might have happened to their human property. And he just had a lot of fun with it. But it was very much a way as he put it, in his deliberately ironic language. It was a lash that he used against the slaveholders. And, you know, it was basically mocking them for not understanding how people were escaping them. You know, which, which I found sort of funny that this was devised by a free Black man, as a way of essentially mocking the white slaveholders, because later on, I came to think about the fact that over the many decades, the underground railroad has become a kind of kinder, gentler way to talk about slavery. And I couldn't help but think that that's partly because there is a role, you know, and a legit role in the history of the Underground Railroad for some good hearted white people. And, you know, we talked about how very, very little is known by most people about the domestic slave trade. And I can't help but think that is because there were no good hearted white people involved in the domestic slave trade. It's just a, you know, a relentlessly grim and horrible story. So we know a great deal about the Underground Railroad and nothing at all about the domestic slave trade. I think that's kind of why.

Kelly Therese Pollock  53:39  
Well, Scott, thank you so much for speaking with me, such a fascinating story. And I really appreciate the book and our conversation today.

Scott Shane  53:48  
My pleasure, I really, I really enjoyed the conversation

Teddy  54:28  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode, and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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