A “Fugitive” Slave’s Tale: From Childhood Trauma in Bondage to Freedom in Maine
In 1837, a young Black refugee disembarked from a steamship in the bustling port of Portland to start his new life as a free man. Seventeen-year-old Leonard Black came to Maine in the hope of reuniting with his older brother George, who had fled slavery a few years earlier. Leonard had heard talk in Boston that a man with his brother’s name had settled in Portland.
Leonard had endured a traumatic childhood of forced labor, physical abuse and family separations. He had never known what it was like to go to school, grow up with a mother or father, or live without constant fear of the lash.
In his 1847 memoir, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black: A Fugitive from Slavery, he recounted his experience fleeing over 500 miles, from Anne Arundel County in Maryland to Maine, after making a harrowing escape from his enslaver. Black’s memoir is not as well known as the accounts of such abolitionist luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Tubman. Even in its time, it wasn’t widely read. But it added to a growing volume of narratives that sought to cut through Southern pro-slavery propaganda and show Americans the truly savage nature of slave life. A deeply religious man, Black’s Christianity was rooted in a radical Black abolitionist theology that emphasized the dismantling of slavery and all racial oppression.
“After more than twenty years of bondage,” his story begins, “God delivered me from it, with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, as he did Israel of old.”
Black’s family was split up when he was very young. His mother and his sister were sold and trafficked to New Orleans, leaving him and his four brothers behind. Their master, a physician, hired the boys out to work for other business owners. The youngest of the five boys, Leonard was six when he was sent to work for a carpenter named Mr. Bradford.
Mrs. Bradford, a devout Methodist, tortured the child relentlessly. On one occasion, she ordered him to carry a bushel of corn upstairs, but the six-year-old couldn’t lift it. Infuriated, she knocked him down with a johnny-cake board, cutting his head so badly, he claimed, that he lost “more than a quart of blood.” At that moment, all Leonard could think of was how much he wanted his mother.
By the end of two years, Mr. Bradford was so worried his wife would kill the boy that he took Leonard to live with the master’s father. But the old man was worse than Mrs. Bradford. He wouldn’t even provide Leonard with pants or a hat to shield him against the baking sun. He was forced to wear a lindsey slip, a type of light dress. At meal time, the elder Bradford ordered him to stand to eat his meager rations, which typically consisted of a bit of pork skin or half a herring with a pint of pot liquor, the broth left over from cooking greens. For dinner, Leonard had a slice of bread and then laid down for the night with a piece of carpet for a blanket. He shivered through the winter and burned his feet as he huddled close to the burning embers in the hearth.
Black celebrated, at age 13, when the old man died, and later wrote, “With all my heart I have forgiven him,” but added, “I expect to meet him at the bar of God with the scars and the tongs.”
In his will, Bradford left Black to his daughter Elizabeth and her brother Nathan. A year later, Elizabeth married a Baltimore coal mine owner named William Gardner, who turned out to be even more sadistic. One morning after watching the coal pit all night, Leonard fell asleep, having mistakenly thought he’d extinguished the fire. When Gardner discovered the 14-year-old sleeping while the pit smoldered, he beat him in the head with a shovel, causing Leonard to be bedridden for two days. “I was so weak from the loss of blood, that he was compelled to carry me home on his shoulders, covering himself with blood,” Black recalled. Gardner also badly beat the boy with farming tools on other occasions.
One day, Leonard and an 18-year-old enslaved girl named Eliza were caught sneaking into the garden to grab some fruit to ease their hunger pangs. “For that offense, our cruel master stripped us and tied us both up together, and whipped us till the blood ran down on the ground in a puddle,” Black wrote.
When Leonard was sick, his enslaver sent him to the smokehouse for fear the youth would vomit on the floor inside the house. Black also fantasized about meeting Mr. Gardner at the “judgment seat, when slave and master appear before the great Judge of all, with equal rights.”
When he turned 14, Black was returned to his former enslavers, the Bradfords, and reunited with his brothers. Shortly after, three of his brothers ran away. Before they left, they advised Leonard and his other brother that if they wanted to escape, they should leave on a Sunday, when the masters were at church.
A man came to the farm one day and gave Leonard a sixpenny bit, which he used to buy a book, as he was eager to learn to read. “I had it but a week, when the old man saw it in my bosom, and made inquiry as to what it was,” Black wrote. “He said, ‘You son of a b–h, if I ever know you to have a book again, I will whip you half to death.’ He took the book from me, and burnt it!”
When Leonard came upon some more money, he bought another book. When his master found it, he beat Leonard “like a dog.”
“He whipped me so very severely that he overcame my thirst for knowledge, and I relinquished its pursuit until after I absconded,” wrote Black. “He took my book from me, and gave it to his son — so it seems the white man’s son must have the means of education, even if stolen from the slave.”
A year later, in 1837, Leonard decided to run away after his remaining brother, Nicholas, was hired out to work outside the household. Leonard made a pact with an enslaved friend named Henry to escape together. But when Henry didn’t turn up at the rendezvous point and Leonard saw his master and sons hunting for him in the moonlight, he realized a “Judas” had betrayed him.
Black just ran, leaving his bundle of clothes and most of his money behind. All he had in his pocket was 75 cents a friendly Quaker had given him that afternoon after he told the man he planned to escape. After running all night, he arrived at a tavern, where the owner offered him breakfast. Sensing a trap, Leonard refused to eat inside, and the white proprietor grabbed him by the collar, but the younger man swiftly threw his attacker down.
“God gave me strength to fight for my life,” Black wrote. “The white man fought me, and I fought him with any thing that came handy, with fists and with stones. I told him he might kill me or I would kill him. Finally, I whipped him.”
Leonard soon heard the baying of bloodhounds and fled into the forest, where he met another man fleeing slavery. Together, they worked for a farmer for a few weeks until they started to get nervous.
Black’s friend set off for New York, but was caught along the way. Black set out on foot to Boston, sleeping in fields and forests and atop the occasional haystack. He frequently suffered from hunger. Using some of the money left over from working on the farm, he bought a loaf of bread when he could, but tried to keep a low profile. After walking hundreds of miles, he arrived in Boston a free man without a penny to his name and only his tattered slave clothes on his back. He immediately began asking residents of the Black neighborhood if they’d seen his brothers.
Black soon met an African-American woman named Sarah Taylor, whose husband, John R. Taylor, ran a boarding house that served as a station on the Underground Railroad. As Black recalled, “She said a George Black had passed through Boston, and lived in Portland (Maine). She said, ‘Come home with me, for I perceive you have been a slave.’ I went and boarded with her for $3 a week.
“I got a gentleman to write to Portland to Mr. George Black, the man I thought was my brother,” Leonard continued. “He supposed I was one of his brothers, he having three brothers in the West Indies. He invited me to come to Portland, and offered to pay my fare. I was very ragged and dirty. Mrs. Taylor wrapped me up in Mr. Taylor’s cloak, and sent me to Portland. Mr. Black sent down his man to the steamboat to get my trunk; but instead of having a trunk, I had scarcely any clothes to my back.”
Unfortunately, as soon as Leonard met George H. Black, he knew the man was not his brother. This George Black was a Baptist minister and abolitionist activist who owned a clothes-cleaning business at the corner of Milk and Federal streets. Rev. Black had been active in the Abyssinian Church and the Colored Convention Movement with Black activist Reuben Ruby. Although George didn’t know anything about Leonard’s brothers, he was very kind to the young refugee. Mrs. Black made him new clothes so he could wear something presentable to church. The Blacks gave Leonard free room and board for the year while he attended high school. Mrs. Black “was more than a mother to me, and the whole family were very kind to me,” Leonard recalled.
The following year, George Black helped him get a job as a farmhand in Bridgton, where he worked for a season. After that, he moved back in with the Blacks to work for abolitionist businessman George Ropes at his manufacturing company in Portland. When Rev. Black moved the family to Boston to take a position as pastor at the historic African Meeting House in in 1838, Leonard followed them. He’d had fallen in love with the Blacks’ daughter, Mary. Months later, they married and eventually had four children.
After the Civil War, Leonard Black moved to Petersburg, Virginia, where he became a very popular pastor of the First Baptist Church. On the day of his funeral in 1883, every store in Petersburg that employed a Black person closed, and more than 5,000 people attended his memorial services.
Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
