A Precarious Freedom: The 1820 Philadelphia Kidnapping Crisis

In 1820, the Pennsylvania state legislature passed the nation's first liberty law. Over the course of debating this legislation, state legislators identified specific cases of free African American kidnapping victims, whose harrowing stories conjured questions related to freedom, slavery, and geographic borders. By analyzing these Philadelphia-based cases at the street level, this paper argues that the connections between and among local, state, and national politics necessitated determining whether these victims were legally enslaved or illegally kidnapped. The kidnapping crisis in Philadelphia emerged as a result of the perpetual inability of White politicians to distinguish between fugitive slave retrieval and the kidnapping of free African Americans. Yet African Americans worked with allies, White and Black, to assert their freedom at the local, state, and national levels in a country that all too often reified their status as enslaved people, despite being free or emancipated. This intriguing and complex interracial effort forced state officials to debate the stakes of Black freedom in Pennsylvania and thus revealed the inherent tensions of living as a free African American in a slaveholding republic.