Stealing Freedom Along the Mason-Dixon Line: Thomas McCreary, the Notorious Slave Catcher from Maryland by Milt Diggins (review)

Thomas McCreary was deemed a dogged and capable catcher of runaway slaves by Maryland’s politicians, newspaper editors, and slave owners. In Pennsylvania he was reviled as a criminal kidnapper and a rapacious “land pirate” who patrolled the Philadelphia-Wilmington-Baltimore corridor seeking to enslave free people of color (p.2). Although he was indicted numerous times in Pennsylvania, the governor of Maryland refused all requests for extradition. Milt Diggins’s concise narrative reveals the complicated connections between slave catchers and kidnappers and their political benefactors in statehouses, thus demonstrating how local events fueled animosity between free and slave states in the 1850s.

Whereas most treatments of slave catching, kidnapping, and fugitive slave laws take an aerial view of their subjects, Diggins explores the intricacies of these controversies at the local and county level. The narrative weaves together newspaper reports, legal records, court transcripts, and official correspondence, giving us a clear view of how fugitive slave laws played out in practice. In recounting McCreary’s career, evidence of an informal network of slave catchers, kidnappers, informants, and slave dealers emerges. It was in a sense an anti–Underground Railroad, nurtured, protected, and shielded by the proslavery political elite. Diggins also effectively provides the perspectives of abolitionists, fugitives, free people, and those who had no objections to slavery itself but protested violations of state law and sovereignty.

The author ably achieves his purpose in bringing a fresh, localized perspective on the controversies over fugitive slaves and the law. Diggins demonstrates how antagonism and enmity over the issues became contentious for those who lived in the Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania border region. Over and again, we see how local events, and individuals like McCreary, were seized upon by politicians, on both sides of the divide, and used as illustrations and examples in broader debates over slavery. Diggins thus reveals how people generally unknown in the historical literature shaped regional events and stoked national conversations concerning the legality and morality of capturing fugitive slaves.

McCreary, we are told, was an inveterate debtor, and money problems fueled his activities. Beyond that observation, Diggins does not engage or seek to know the motivations of his protagonist. Certainly, this omission stems from a lack of source material, but some exploration of McCreary’s personality would have been helpful, even if it were done by reference to other slave catchers in the secondary literature. Overall, Stealing Freedom: Thomas McCreary, the Notorious Slave Catcher from Maryland is a detailed inspection of slave catching and kidnapping that uncovers the political connections between those who sought to arrest fugitive slaves and those who found such activities useful, profitable, and even admirable. The book is an ideal vehicle for demonstrating how the fugitive slave issue exacerbated sectional tensions in communities separated by only a couple of miles and yet were worlds apart in their view of slavery. Stealing Freedom should be of use to scholars interested in fugitive slave laws and sectional tensions. Moreover, it is an excellent resource for students seeking to understand how fugitive slave laws animated resistance to slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line.