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Outlaws Together

The story of a remarkable woman, Mary Walker, who fled slavery in 1848, leaving her children behind.

While many if not most antebellum slaves ran away, very few made it to the "promised land" of the North. The barriers to freedom were formidable. By far the majority of those who succeeded were men from the upper South, who traveled alone in the hope of avoiding detection. Willing to abandon family and friends, they had no idea what they would find even if they reached free soil.

Frederick Douglass, America's most famous runaway, described his anxiety, mixed with the joy of freedom, after reaching New York City in 1838. "A sense of loneliness and insecurity oppressed me," he said. "I was without home, without friends, without work, without money." He was free "from slavery but free from food and shelter as well."

Women's ties to their children made escaping slavery even more treacherous. In many cases, women tried running away with their children. The most memorable female escape may be the one, based on a true story, recounted in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of Eliza Harris crossing the Ohio River on rafts of ice with her child in her arms.

In another famous incident, from 1855, a North Carolina master brought his servant Jane Johnson and her two small boys with him to Philadelphia. While waiting for a boat to New York, Johnson told a black man that she wanted to be free. The city's abolitionists sprang into action, and in a few hours she and her children were rescued.

But with few exceptions, we know little about the day-to-day lives of female runaways, their families and their relationships with Northern whites. Sydney Nathans's "To Free a Family" is a minor masterpiece that goes a long way toward filling this gap. Deeply researched and elegantly written, it tells the story of Mary Walker, a slave and possibly the daughter of Duncan Cameron, one of North Carolina's most prominent men. Walker was born in 1818, the same year as Frederick Douglass. She became one of Cameron's house servants and learned to read and write.


To Free a Family

By Sydney Nathans
(Harvard, 330 pages, $29.95)

In 1846, Walker went to Philadelphia for the summer with Cameron and his daughter. Walker met free blacks there who would have helped her escape, but with three children still in bondage in North Carolina, and a promise of freedom from the Camerons, she was loath to run away. She told her owners that she had "but little love for the north."

Two years later, Walker decided that she liked the North well enough. On another visit to Philadelphia, she and Cameron engaged in an argument vehement enough to prompt him to warn her that when they returned to North Carolina he would sell her to another plantation. The only impediment to Walker's running away had been lifted: "No matter what happened she would lose her children," Mr. Nathans writes. "Faced with the choice of exile or escape," she fled her master and found refuge in Philadelphia.

For two years, Walker worked as a seamstress for James Lesley, a young merchant and abolitionist. But in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it easier than ever for slave owners to reclaim runaways. Aware that Cameron was in Philadelphia again and believing that she was in "imminent danger," Walker moved to Boston, the nation's hotbed of abolitionism.

In Boston, Walker lived with James Lesley's cousin, Peter Lesley, and his wife, Susan. They were newcomers to abolitionism. Peter had trained as a Presbyterian minister but took a job preaching at a small Congregational church in Milton, Mass. The Presbyterians accused him of heresy and revoked his license, but the Congregationalists refused to ordain him as a minister. Although the members of his church voted to retain him, he said that he felt "like a hunted slave."

The Fugitive Slave Law, according to Mr. Nathans, moved Peter Lesley from "sympathy to antislavery action." It required all citizens to assist in hunting down fugitives and made it a crime to assist them. By agreeing to harbor Mary Walker, the minister became an outlaw and embraced a "higher law," or God's law. He urged his congregants to "give this law of Congress to the winds" and "protect the oppressed wherever you behold him."

Susan Lesley was amazed that the woman that she and her husband were sheltering was a fugitive, "for no one would guess it from her color, her hair is quite smooth," Susan wrote in a letter, and she spoke "the most beautiful English I ever heard." Walker transformed the Lesleys, Mr. Nathans says, becoming part of the family. She formed an intimate bond with Susan, who recounted how, one evening when Susan was resting, Walker came into the room, "knelt down, took my hand, and pressed it to her heart. She kissed it. She stroked my hair with her other hand." Then "she told me the whole strange tragedy of her life."

Mr. Nathans is brilliant at reconstructing Mary Walker's life and her relationship with Peter and Susan Lesley. Since only three letters from Walker have been found, she comes alive through Peter and Susan's letters and their family papers, as well as through the Cameron family papers and the archives of Boston abolitionists. Mr. Nathans creates a vibrant and subtle portrait of the Lesleys, enabling readers to decide for themselves how trusting Mary Walker's relationship with them became.

The result is a remarkable story of an extended biracial family that embarked on a 15-year effort to reunite Walker with her surviving children. Two of Walker's three children finally arrived in Cambridge in the summer of 1865. She "was overcome with joy." Her daughter married a freedman who found steady work as a carpenter. Her son married an Irish immigrant and became the sexton of the First Parish Church of Cambridge.

In 1870, Mary Walker used her savings from years of sewing and caregiving to purchase a home near Harvard on Brattle Street. She died two years later. But she had secured for her children and grandchildren "one of the good houses" of Cambridge. She had learned, Mr. Nathans says, that "the fruits of freedom would not be gained in a single generation."

Mr. Stauffer, who teaches history and literature at Harvard, is the author of "The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race."

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