Kidnapper and Slave Trader Patty Cannon (c. 1760-1829) and the Illicit Market for Slaves in the U.S.

FAIN: FT-61131-13

Richard J. Bell
University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)

Long before Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) fixed the depiction of man-stealers in the American imagination, there was Patty Cannon (c. 1760-1829). A kidnapper, enslaver and slave trader of unprecedented audacity and ambition, this Delaware woman died by her own hand in prison in 1829. Concluded decades before the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 brought the abduction of free black men and women to national attention, her repellent career offers a rare glimpse of slavery’s darkest secret: a black market underworld in which legally free people were kidnapped and traded as slaves; a reverse underground railroad of infamous repute in its day that has since been largely forgotten. I seek an NEH Summer Stipend to fund two months of extended primary source research at Duke University Library, Yale University Library and the American Antiquarian Society; the three archives best equipped to help me reconstruct Cannon’s illicit activities.

Associated Products

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Abstract: This essay examines the role and significance of kidnappers of color in the reverse underground railroad, a vast human trafficking network that captured and coffled thousands of free African Americans from Mid-Atlantic states to the Deep South for sale as slaves. This black-market business—of infamous repute in its day, though since largely forgotten—sprang to life soon after the American Revolution as an illicit and illegal corollary to the rise of the domestic slave trade. This essay focuses its attention on the previously unexamined presence of black and mixed-race actors in these kidnapping schemes and explores the context for and motivations of that generation of “colored kidnappers.” To do so, it places their seemingly unfathomable actions in conversation with the choices made by enslaved informants on southern plantations and those made by the many African Americans who collaborated with bounty hunters and slave catchers to retrieve runaways in this period. It argues that the divisive actions of black kidnappers problematize the historiographical consensus about racial solidarity and political identity within the black community. However, it also documents this same community’s simultaneous efforts to publicly denounce, promptly apprehend, and violently punish by extra-legal means the “treacherous creatures” ” who abducted their friends, neighbors, and family members. Such activities, it concludes, provided a modest yet formative opportunity for people of color living in border states to respond to the critically important questions of loyalty, authenticity, and kinship raised by the counterfeit kin who lived in their midst—and to forge common cause against them.
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Abstract: The abduction of free African Americans from cities like Philadelphia and the wholly illegal traffic of such people into the Deep South to be sold as slaves provided exceptional opportunities for women to participate directly in the American interstate slave trade as kidnappers, warehouse managers, and coffle co-captains. The activities of the Cannon-Johnson ring, active in the 1820s, demonstrate how Delaware’s Patty Cannon and other female traffickers leveraged kinship relations with male conductors and station agents on this reverse underground railroad in order to secure their own passage through an otherwise treacherous and decidedly homo-social world.
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