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

On the evening of December 16, 1851, Thomas McCreary ambushed thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Parker as she crossed her employer's yard. Her seized her by the neck, forced a gag in her mouth, and plunged her into the back of a two-horse wagon heading south out of Pennsylvania and toward the Mason-Dixon line. Two weeks later, he located Elizabeth's seventeen-year-old-sister, Rachel Parker, and abducted her too—this time in broad daylight. McCreary was a slavecatcher from Maryland, and though the Parker sisters were legally free Pennsylvanians, their physical proximity to the border of a slave state meant that they had long been vulnerable to kidnapping and enslavement.

Stealing Freedom is a tightly focused study of the slave hunter and kidnapper Thomas McCreary and the struggles of the Parker sisters to try to regain their freedom. Situating this dramatic and affecting story in the context of the whirling political maelstrom produced by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Milt Diggins succeeds in reconstructing the political networks and legal structures that encouraged, enabled, and protected McCreary's livelihood. Notably, McCreary leveraged a relationship with the young lawyer and future Maryland state senator Hiram McCullough, who rescued him from insolvency in 1838. McCreary used McCullough's connections to gain appointment to a series of minor public offices and, in the course of the 1840s, slowly inserted himself into the state's Democratic patronage machine. Later, in 1852, when McCreary finally stood trial for kidnapping Rachel Parker, four Maryland attorneys came to his defense, three of them active Democratic politicians and one "a prominent state official and former governor" (133).

Stealing Freedom is filled with findings like this. Indeed, it is Diggins's spotlight on the life of the perpetrator, Thomas McCreary, that distinguishes Stealing Freedom from recent works published on the case, most recently Lucy Maddox's The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping (2016). In both books, Thomas McCreary appears as a roving slave catcher and kidnapper, equal parts wily and ruthless, unafraid to bare his "double brace of six-shooters, and his Arkansas tooth-pick" (86). Yet, Diggins illuminates a humanized McCreary. No stranger to personal debt, he leaned heavily on the income of his wife, Mary McCreary, and he likely turned to kidnapping for the same reason he manufactured and sold corn shellers—opportunity for profit. That McCreary so casually resorted to kidnapping to supplement his income is telling of life and law along the Mason-Dixon and damning for those on each side who stood silent.

McCreary's kidnapping career thrived on the competing jurisdictions of Pennsylvania and Maryland, specifically the ambiguity between slave catching and kidnapping. The stakes of this distinction were high after the passage of the controversial Fugitive Slave Act and were raised higher after a Maryland slaveholder was killed in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a year later. Why did McCreary choose this time to embark on the most audacious kidnapping scheme of his unsavory career? Stealing Freedom tells the story of a kidnapper protected by political patrons and lionized in the proslavery press. McCreary understood that to Maryland's proslavery elite, he "was more than a mere slave hunter; he was a foot soldier in an undeclared war" (17).

To gauge public sentiment, Diggins makes extensive use of the "cross-border editorial sniping" of pro-and antislavery advocates published in local newspapers. For all the value in this approach, it has the drawback of privileging voices of opprobrium over more subtle means of communicating sentiment. Diggins sufficiently illustrates that the Mason-Dixon line was not an absolute barrier between slavery and freedom. It would not be surprising, therefore, that communities drawn together by the geography, trade, and social life of the Baltimore-Wilmington-Philadelphia corridor would treat each other as locals, even neighbors. For example, only days before McCreary...