Slave Catchers In Chatham!

Events of the 1850's

In 1857, John Wells and T.G. James, both from the Southern USA, came to Chatham to recover "a smart, coloured lad named Joseph Alexander." A large crowd of the town's blacks and Alexander gathered in front of the Royal Exchange Hotel to hear the two white men speak. James told the crowd that Joe was a good boy, but too big and saucy. He went on to say he had only beat Joe once after he had been drunk, smashed a carriage, and let some horses run away. Then Joe got up and told everyone that how Wells and James owned one of the biggest slave pens in the South. They held 500 slaves behind St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans. The men saw that the crowd was against them and offered Joe $100 to go to Windsor. Joe appealed to the group, "I am positive from what I know of James that he would shoot me dead and then leave me, for he would just as soon shoot a man as a squirrel and a white man as a black man - and Wells is just like him." The crowd escorted the two to the train and Joe Alexander won his freedom.

The Fugitive Slave Law passed in September 1850, allowed escaped slaves to be captured and brought back to their masters. The law also prosecuted anyone who helped hide slaves or who aided fugitive slaves in any way. The law was expensive to the United States of America, as it cost thousands of dollars to return all slaves to the places from where they had escaped. A boom also began in the slave catching business. It was easy to take any black person, free or not and say they escaped. Slave catchers roamed the whole continent looking for black people. Due to this law, many blacks escaped to Canada in the 1850's-60. The Fugitive Slave Law was responsible for the escalation of blacks in Chatham and Buxton, as they were final stations of the Underground Railroad.