In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Stealing Freedom Along the Mason-Dixon Line: Thomas McCreary, the Notorious Slave Catcher from Maryland by Milt Diggins
  • Patricia A. Reid
Stealing Freedom Along the Mason-Dixon Line: Thomas McCreary, the Notorious Slave Catcher from Maryland. By Milt Diggins (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2015. ix plus 238 pp.).

Milt Diggins' empirical research on slave catcher/kidnapper Thomas McCreary purports to tell us about the life and escapades of a "notorious," and, from the [End Page 731] enslaved person's point of view, nefarious individual, who gained a reputation by capturing and imprisoning enslaved individuals who fled bondage to find freedom in northern free communities as the sectional crisis began to escalate on the borderlands between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Much of his evidence, however, points to McCreary tragically disrupting free black lives by kidnapping them as fugitive slaves. The author chronicles McCreary's social and political relations and contacts he navigated to become a valuable asset to proslavery advocates and slaveholders because of his unscrupulous hunting of people of African descent in surrounding free territories.

The geopolitics along the Mason/Dixon line is a perfect setting for a study of slave-catching because this contested border offers the extremes of both proslavery ideology and abolitionist activity. Both Maryland and Pennsylvania had to figure out economic and legal strategies to enable the two states to work in cooperation despite their radically different legal trajectories. Their varied economic systems – a race-based slave system to the south and a race-based free system to the north – provided an important setting where someone as troublesome as McCreary could further agitate political and economic differences. And the differing way that the courts dealt with someone like McCreary further reveals just how polarized these two neighboring states were.

Perhaps most salacious about Thomas McCreary was his persistent invasions into the households and private lives of free black families and his manipulation and out right violations of Pennsylavania's personal liberty laws of 1826 and 1847, which were attempts to protect the free black community from kidnappers. In privileging southern and federal fugitive laws by extending them into free northern territories, McCreary conflated the lives of the free with those of the enslaved and demonstrated just how vulnerable northern communities of free blacks were to extra legal kidnappings. In other words, more often than not, McCreary and his posse of kidnappers took the law into their own hands in their hunt for those who had allegedly absconded. The first chapters of Stealing Freedom point to just how intrusive these slave hunters were and in many cases if the kidnapped free black person did not protest loudly and vehemently of their free status they could end up enslaved or on the auction block to some southern market. Also, depending on the location of the courthouse, whether in Pennsylvania or in Maryland, their protest of freedom may not have been heard, thus their lives and livelihoods were torn asunder by McCreary's extra legal efforts to capture fugitive slaves under the guise of federal law.

Diggins suggests that there was a fine line between whether or not McCreary was more of a slave catcher, eagerly working on behalf of the slave-holder, or more of a kidnapper, illegally snatching up free blacks and selling them to southern markets as slaves. In my reading of Diggins, it is clear that McCreary sought to profit from the illegal selling of free African Americans in ways he would not if he were working on behalf of the slaveholder. After all, Diggins points out that McCreary had many financial problems before his career as a slave catcher, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy or imprisonment as a result, and that much of his navigation within proslavery political circles involved some sort of unethical business dealings which would eventually find himself [End Page 732] working as a slave catcher. After the war, his economic status remained unstable.

Because of Diggins' seemingly unrestrained access to archival data in a variety of Maryland county archives, he is able to use a wide variety of primary resource material of the time and location in which McCreary lived. However, the chronological and argumentative structure of each...

pdf

Share