Virginia Slave Flees While Visiting Ohio, June 7, 1851.
Cincinnati Attorney at Law Thomas M. Ward, writes Sheriff Thomas Hill, Jr. of Rappahannock, VA, asking him to locate a Woodville Jones in nearby Culpeper. While visiting Cincinnati, Jones’s “nigro girl … who accompanied her master … ran off from [him], and has ever since remained her own mistress in this City [and] can be taken without difficulty.”
For refuge and sustenance a successful escape depended on the secret abolitionist network called the Underground Railroad. However, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act the previous year, even free blacks would not feel safe unless and until they reached Canada.
Curiously, the “girl” above, most certainly a grown woman, takes no precaution against recapture – here, by attorney Ward, who upholding the new federal law, awaits Jones’s terms of authorization to seize her.