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Margaret Morgan was condemned to lead a consequential life.
In 1837, Morgan was living quietly with her husband and six children in Pennsylvania, a state in which slavery was illegal. On April 1, the African American family was kidnapped in the middle of the night by bounty hunters. They were thrown into an open wagon “in a cold, sleety rain” according to one account, and dragged to the Harford County farm of a widow who claimed she owned them.
Because Morgan had been living as free, her capture ignited protests nationwide among abolitionists. The legal battle between Maryland and Pennsylvania culminated in 1842 in a landmark Supreme Court case and prompted the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — pivotal events that historians say contributed to the U.S. Civil War.
And it all started in Harford County.
“When I started working on my book about Margaret Morgan, I was really surprised to learn that this major Supreme Court case originated right here,” said Iris Leigh Barnes, executive director of the Hosanna School Museum in Darlington.
“No one was talking about it.”
Morgan’s travails are among several stories pertaining to the Underground Railroad in Harford County that are beginning to become known outside the small circle of Civil War historians. That is thanks in part to a new exhibit at the Havre de Grace Maritime Museum and research being conducted by Barnes and others.
More than a century and a half after the Civil War ended, the operations of the Underground Railroad from Bel Air to Berkley and the flights to freedom remain just that — underground and hidden from view.
“It was all very hush-hush,” said Bruce Russell, who curated the exhibit, “The Underground Railroad: Other Voices of Freedom.”
“Harford County was inimical to escaping slaves,” he said. “Everything was word-of-mouth, and the history is really hard to put together.”
For instance, the famed orator Frederick Douglass slipped away from his captors by train from Baltimore. In his book, “My Escape From Slavery,” Douglass describes a harrowing moment as the train approached the end of the line in Harford County, and the conductor asked to see Douglass’ manumission papers.
“I was well on the way to Havre de Grace before the conductor came into the Negro car to collect tickets and examine the papers of his Black passengers,” Douglass wrote. “This was a critical moment in the drama. My whole future depended upon the decision of this conductor.”
And yet, no marker or historic sign exists in what now is David R. Craig Park to commemorate the dramatic escape of Douglass or of the hundreds of others who, like him, fled captivity by train.
Another example: The Quaker abolitionist William Worthington helped runaways escape from the landing outside his home in Dublin, according to the Maryland State Archives. He frequently collaborated with Hazzard “Had” Harris, a Black man who was formerly enslaved.
“When fugitives came to the area seeking aid, someone would approach Worthington,” according to the account in the archives.
” ‘Uncle Billy,’ they would say in coded language, ‘there’re people on the hill.’ Worthington would direct food and provisions to the fugitives, who remained hid in his cornfields. At night, the runaways would be led to Harris,” who guided them across the Susquehanna River.
Today, that historic site lies beneath what is now the Conowingo Dam.
According to William J. Switala, a retired professor at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University and the author of three books about the Underground Railroad, escapes in the county peaked between 1830 and 1850.
“Originally, Harford County was a tobacco-growing area,” he said, “but around 1830, the farms began to switch to growing wheat, barley and rye. It was much less labor-intensive, so a lot of landowners freed some of their slaves.”
The 1850 Maryland census, Switala said, documents 39,000 free Black people and 17,000 enslaved people. Freed Black people often worked with Quaker abolitionists to shepherd escapees across state lines.
Tony Cohen, who helped research the exhibit at the Maritime Museum, said the common idea of the Underground Railroad as a secret network of conductors and agents and safe houses is inaccurate.
“It often was a loosely organized system of escape,” said Cohen, who founded the Germantown-based nonprofit Menare Foundation, dedicated to preserving Underground Railroad history.
“The railroad included transportation routes and sanctuaries or shelters, most of which were not inside people’s homes.”
For instance, the only Harford County site known to have operated as a traditional Underground Railroad station is Swallowfield, the Darlington estate formerly owned by the Quaker Gideon Smith.
His great-granddaughter, Jean Ewing, later wrote, “People were coming through … they stayed in the barn or in the icehouse right outside the main house at Swallowfield.”
Another misconception: that escapes were made over land. The most direct route for those fleeing to Philadelphia was to follow Deer Creek to the Susquehanna River, and then cross by boat into Cecil County.
“In the 1850s, Deer Creek and the Susquehanna River were basically the equivalents of I-95,” Russell said. “People escaped via the waterways.”
The exhibit tells stories of such daring flights as the one masterminded by the 200-pound Henry “Box” Brown, who in 1849 lowered himself into a wooden crate 2 feet tall and wide and 3 feet deep, and had himself shipped by train from Richmond, Virginia, to abolitionist friends in Philadelphia — a journey lasting 27 hours.
Then there’s the saga of William and Ellen Craft, who bluffed their way from Macon, Georgia, to Boston. A light-skinned Black woman who could pass as white, Ellen Craft disguised herself as a disabled white man, while her darker-complexioned husband posed as her manservant. (At the time, Russell said, a white woman would not have traveled alone with a Black manservant.)
Their four-day journey began in Macon in 1848 and involved three legs each by train and steamship.
Both the Crafts and Brown passed through Harford County; once their trains reached Havre de Grace, the cars containing northbound passengers were ferried across the river to Cecil County and attached to a Philadelphia-bound locomotive.
At the time, Harford County was not unlike the Wild West. A volatile mix of freed Black people and Quaker abolitionists jostled up against slaveholders and bounty hunters who concentrated their activities in the towns along the Susquehanna.
For instance, Cohen discovered that the farm owned by Margaret Morgan’s captor Edward Prigg abuts the Underground Railroad station of Swallowfield. John Wilkes Booth, the Confederate sympathizer who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, grew up in Bel Air. And in frontier towns, frontier justice often prevails.
“These border communities were very, very dangerous,” Switala said.
“Slave catchers would congregate there because they knew it’s where the majority of fugitives were coming through. There were also unscrupulous free Blacks who posed as Underground Railroad agents. Instead of helping you, they would drug you and sell you back into slavery.”
The Fugitive Slave Act made the already dangerous flight to freedom in Harford County triply treacherous, according to David Armenti, education director for the Maryland Center for History and Culture, by requiring citizens in free states to assist the captors.
If you were Black, “it meant that even after you crossed into a free state, you were never safe,” he said. “After 1850, instead of settling in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, fugitives began to travel all the way to Canada or upstate New York.”
If there was a silver lining to Margaret Morgan’s capture, he said, it’s that the Fugitive Slave Act strengthened the opposition. The Underground Railroad became more organized and firmly established, extending north into New York and New Hampshire. Public support for abolition increased. More money was invested in legal defense.
“It’s one of the major events that led to the Civil War,” Armenti said.
The Underground Railroad in Maryland
“The Underground Railroad: Other Voices of Freedom” is scheduled to open in late February at the Havre de Grace Maritime Museum, 100 Lafayette St., Havre de Grace. For details, call 410-939-4800 or visit hdgmaritimemuseum.org.
“Divided Voices: Maryland in the Civil War” is running at the Maryland Center for History and Culture, 610 Park Ave., Baltimore. For details, call 410-685-3750 or visit mdhistory.org.
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