Stolen

August 1, 2019

In 1825, five African American boys were kidnapped in Philadelphia and taken on a journey on the Reverse Underground Railroad that took them as far as Alabama, where they were sold into slavery. Bell (history, Univ. of Maryland) demonstrates that their story was not an unusual one: even in so-called "free" states, African Americans were routinely kidnapped and taken South to feed the insatiable demand for enslaved labor on cotton plantations. Children were especially vulnerable. What is unusual about this case is that the kidnapped boys eventually returned home, thanks to an unlikely partnership between the Philadelphia mayor and an Alabama lawyer. It's a fascinating story, but one in which the voices and experiences of the victims are largely absent. The few primary sources available give only a hint of the details, and Bell frequently resorts to guesses as to what they "probably" or "must have" felt. VERDICT Overall, recommended for readers interested in American history, especially those seeking an understanding of slavery's impact on life throughout the United States.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019
A historian tells the harrowing story of five free black boys kidnapped in Philadelphia by a brutal gang who hoped to sell them into slavery. After the United States outlawed the importing of slaves in 1808, black residents of free states like Pennsylvania lived in dread of kidnappers who hoped to sell them in the labor-deprived South. Bell (Early American History/Univ. of Maryland; We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, 2012) brings their terrors to life as he reconstructs this little-known episode in American history. The author focuses on five boys lured onto a ship on the Philadelphia waterfront in 1825 by a criminal gang led by Joseph Johnson, whose accomplices included his brother and sister-in-law, Ebenezer and Sally Johnson. Newlyweds Ebenezer and Sally took the boys on a horrific journey by foot and wagon toward the slave market in Natchez, Mississippi, that soon went awry. Ebenezer sold one boy in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, when cash ran low and beat another so savagely he died on the trip. The three remaining boys, desperate but alert, caught a break when one ran away and told his story to a sympathetic Mississippi cotton planter. That encounter set in motion near-miraculous events involving heroic acts by the planter and his lawyer and Joseph Watson, the mayor of Philadelphia, all determined to return the boys to the city and to freedom. Tapping rich archival sources, Bell overreaches only when he strains to portray criminals like the Johnson gang as a "Reverse Underground Railroad," drawing oversimplified parallels between people like Harriet Tubman, a "conductor" on that storied network, and murderous thugs like Ebenezer, whom he casts as "a conductor" on its evil twin. His book--more comprehensive than Solomon Northup's memoir of his own kidnapping, Twelve Years a Slave--needed no such distracting comparisons to deserve wide attention. Ultimately, Bell offers a well-told story of brave, abducted boys--and the equally brave adults who fought for them--slightly undercut by its aggressive casting of Underground Railroad workers and kidnappers of free blacks as mirror images of one another. A deep dive into the extraordinary risks faced by free blacks in the antebellum era.

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October 7, 2019
University of Maryland professor Bell (We Shall Be No More) uncovers the history of the Reverse Underground Railroad in this moving account of five African-American boys kidnapped from Philadelphia and sold into slavery in 1825. According to Bell, “child snatching was frequent, pernicious, and politically significant” in the decades after Congress banned slave imports from Africa and the Caribbean in 1808. After being kidnapped, the boys were forced to make a 1,000-mile trek to the slave markets of Natchez, Miss. Along the way, 10-year-old Cornelius Sinclair was sold to an Alabama cotton planter, and the kidnappers beat another boy to death. In Rocky Springs, Miss., 15-year-old Sam Scomp convinced a plantation owner that he and the others had been abducted, setting into motion a series of legal battles that, Bell argues, culminated in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which “put the country on a collision course with civil war.” Drawing from a wealth of archival materials, Bell paints a harrowing picture of this human trafficking network and the “tens of thousands of free black people” it ensnared. The result is a scholarly work that tells a powerful human interest story.

October 1, 2019
Prize-winning historian Bell reconstructs how five free African American boys in Philadelphia in 1825 were lured into the Reverse Underground Railroad, a brutal human trafficking network; their four-month journey through the Deep South, and the national campaign for their safe return. Bell tells each boy's story, including detailed accounts of their endurance in the face of unimaginable cruelty and iniquity, and recounts the exposure of those who were responsible. Bell frames their ordeal as a presaging of the Civil War, with the legal fight to curtail such kidnapping and human trafficking culminating in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Bell makes it clear how slavery and capitalism worked in tandem then and now as such crimes continue in a time of growing apathy toward the disadvantaged. An examination of the motivations of the white men who intervened as well as those of the kidnappers and slavers provides further insight into the political and economic forces at work. Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell's investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)