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4. “. . . How Much of oursels We owned” Finding Freedom along the Mason-Dixon Line The image still haunted her. In the spring of 1820, Eliza Thomas had witnessed her master, Colonel James Samuel Hook, being “caught in a sawmill, and drawn out like a plank. . . . [Y]ou could n’t tell he’d ever been a man.” Decades later, she remembered that the colonel’s death was the beginning of “awful times” for his enslaved men and women. All slaves dreaded their owners’ deaths, which often heralded the dissolution of the estate and the destruction of fragile slave communities. Hook’s unexpected demise must have been especially bitter for Thomas and many others on his Frederick County plantation, for they had been promised their freedom. Hook died intestate and never made formal, written arrangements to manumit his chattels, but many of his people believed that freedom was tantalizingly close. They “did not know how much of oursels we owned,” Thomas poignantly recalled, but she insisted that many of her fellow slaves “ought to have gone free.” Hook had purchased Thomas days before his death with the understanding that he would set her free. “My time was not quite out,” Thomas recalled, “and massa made [Hook] promise that he would free me, just as soon as ever it was.” Thomas’s husband, an enslaved carpenter, Josh Gowins, had also expected to be manumitted, “but he was sold at the block, jis like the cattle, and stript half naked so they might see he was strong.” Whatever promises or understandings Hook had made with his slaves were brushed aside by his executors, who moved quickly to sell his “45 Valuable Negroes, consisting of men, women, and children.” Thomas, her husband, and their five children were sold as slaves for life to planter Samuel Ringgold.1 Eliza Thomas and her family were not alone in the treacherous terrain between slavery and freedom. In 1847, J. E. Snodgrass recounted the story of 116 chapter 4 an African American woman in Williamsport who “regarded herself as a ‘free woman’—free as the air of the surrounding hills.” Despite having enjoyed her freedom “for some time,” and despite being acknowledged as free by “all who knew her,” the woman was in a precarious situation because she had not been legally manumitted. “She had no free papers,” Snodgrass wrote, “having omitted to secure them, it was said, through over-confidence in . . . a verbal promise of freedom. Fatal omission, too frequently made by the virtually freed.” The woman’s illusion of freedom was shattered when men seized her and her baby and dragged them to Hagerstown, “there to await the highest bidder for [their] blood and bones.” The woman’s ordeal was made more agonizing by her master’s decision to separate mother and child because the infant was “deemed an encumbrance . . . in the slave mart.”2 The promise of freedom through either immediate or delayed manumission and the threat of sale loomed large in the minds of Eliza Thomas, the unnamed slave woman, and their enslaved brethren and sisters along the Mason-Dixon Line. While some waited anxiously for their freedom, others forced slave owners’ hands by striking northward for freedom. The connections among manumission, slave discipline, and the domestic trade appeared in stark relief during a series of 1849 incidents that unfolded on a plantation owned by William Henry Warfield and his sister, Susanna. In January of that year, a Quaker had purchased the son of “Little Sam,” for the ostensible purpose of manumitting him but instead sold him to a trader. Sam’s resentment over the betrayal simmered until May, when he and his father, “Big Sam,” headed for Pennsylvania. Discovering the escape, William Henry Warfield fumed that he would “sell them and whip them,” which prompted a quick reproach from his sister, who warned that “if they hear that they will not return.” Within days, the fugitives were captured and imprisoned. Warfield “spoke kindly” to the fugitives and “asked them if they were willing to go back, to which they said No!” He then transferred them to the pen of notorious slave dealer Joseph S. Donovan. Warfield subsequently sold the fugitives to Donovan for $850 but reserved the right to void the transaction within five days. While he haggled with Donovan, Big Sam’s mother (and Little Sam’s grandmother) pled with Susanna to spare the fugitives from being sold to the Deep South, where she feared “they would be cut up so.” Susanna...

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