“Slave Stampedes”: A Powerful Metaphor

The story of large group escapes, which journalists at the time called “slave stampedes,” is directly relevant –maybe even central—to the coming of the Civil War. The revolutionary efforts of entire groups of freedom seekers haunted the nightmares of antebellum slaveholders across Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Virginia, and beyond. In fact, the specter of slave stampedes loomed so largely in American political culture that events such as John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Benjamin Butler’s “contraband of war” declaration in 1861, or even Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in 1863, cannot be fully understood in context without some reference to “stampeding” slaves. It was a truly powerful metaphor that reflected an even more powerful desire –the revolutionary determination of some enslaved African Americans to have both freedom and family, even at the risk of significant violence.

Defining the Term

The very first edition of John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms published in New York in 1848 offered an entry for “stampede” or “stampado” that identified its origins as the Spanish word “estampado” which it defined as the “noise of stamping feet.”  According to Bartlett’s, the American usage of stampede was supposed to describe the “general scamper of animals on the Western prairies, generally caused by a fright.” However, when Bartlett revised his popular dictionary in 1859, he expanded the entry for stampede into nearly two full pages in order to illustrate how the term had been rather quickly “transferred to men” from “animals,” including to describe freedom-seeking enslaved people. By the start of the Civil War, it was this type of usage––referencing groups of escaping enslaved people––that had become as popular as any other. Some 21st-century Americans might worry that the term was universally employed as yet another way to dehumanize African Americans. Yet that is not the whole story. The term conveyed great power. For slaveholders and their allies, they undoubtedly saw that power through a white supremacist lens and used the language with disdain. Yet for the abolitionists and the freedom seekers themselves, the concept offered a quite different meaning. They saw it as validation of a powerful liberation movement.

Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Borderlands

This joint National Park Service Network to Freedom and House Divided Project initiative investigates “Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Borderlands” with a focus on Eastern Missouri and escapes from there into borderlands such as Illinois and Iowa. The goal of these research projects, now known as Slave Stampedes on the Southern Borderlands, will be to produce full-length state reports accompanied by various online resources, such as interactive maps, videos, and an underlying database of sources. We expect these freely available resources to help spark further classroom discussion and more expansive scholarly research into this national phenomenon.

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1849: First Missouri "Stampedes"

The new “slave stampede” metaphor was certainly on the minds of newspaper editors when between 35 and 50 enslaved freedom seekers from Canton, Missouri in Lewis County gathered one night, attempting to escape to Canada by way of Illinois. Canton was one of the first—but definitely not the last—slave stampedes from antebellum Missouri. Within a couple of months after the shoot-out in Lewis County, there was a more successful stampede of an enslaved group from the St. Louis area that passed through Springfield, Illinois on their way toward Chicago. By the early 1850s, the popular metaphor for group freedom-seeking had become a headline fixture in the sectional propaganda wars.  

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1849 Canton Stampede

In early November 1849, somewhere between 35 and 50 enslaved people around Canton in Lewis County, Missouri, led by a woman named Lin and a man known as Miller's John, planned a stampede for freedom but were betrayed and cornered before they could cross the Mississippi River.  There was a violent shootout that left at least one dead and resulted in dozens of newspaper articles across the nation.

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1853 Palmyra Stampede

On Saturday night, October 29, 1853, 11 freedom seekers escaped from a series of farms and homes clustered around the border town of Palmyra, Missouri. Those 11 men, women, and children charted a course across the moonlit Mississippi River to Quincy, Illinois. Not stopping, they plodded on an additional 12 miles, reaching the town of Mendon, Illinois, where they likely received assistance from abolitionist Jireh Platt and his family. In response, furious Missouri slaveholders railed against Underground Railroad activists and took extra precautions to prevent future group escapes.

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1854: A Tipping Point in the Sectional Crisis

This was a hidden tipping point for the sectional crisis, one that most scholars and teachers have so far failed recognized. Nearly forty St. Louis-area African Americans successfully escaped from enslavement over the span of less than a month in late 1854. The real angst emanating from the St. Louis newspapers over the successful 1854 stampedes was only further evidence of how deeply pessimistic Border State slaveholders were becoming by the middle of the decade. They were convinced that the fugitive slave law had become a dead letter and that the prospect of keeping their enslaved property from running away was growing ever more dismal. 

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1854 St. Louis Stampedes

Two large group escapes in October and November 1854 rocked St. Louis slaveholders. The first "stampede" on Sunday night, October 22, 1854, saw a group of “fifteen or twenty” enslaved Missourians, including “a number of women and children" and “some aged and crippled,” successfully escape up the Mississippi River to Keokuk, Iowa and by land across Wisconsin (and reportedly all the way to Canada). The second "stampede" of some 17 freedom seekers occurred over the weekend of November 24-26. After slaveholder Richard Berry tracked the freedom seekers to Chicago, a botched attempt to enforce the new federal Fugitive Slave Act in Chicago left St. Louis slaveholders stewing over Northern states' "nullification" of federal law and the mounting currents of enslaved resistance.

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1855 St. Louis Stampede

On Sunday night, May 20, 1855, a group of about eight or nine freedom seekers set out across the Mississippi River near St. Louis on a skiff designed to take them over to the free state of Illinois. Hours earlier, they had met under the cover of darkness at the home of Mary Meachum, a leader in St. Louis’ black community and one of the likely masterminds behind the escape. According to some newspaper reports, two other local black organizers of the nighttime expedition were Isaac Breckenridge and Julia Burrows. Some accounts also identify unnamed white antislavery activists and a black guide from Illinois named “Freeman” meeting the freedom seeking group on the other side of the river. Regardless, word had gotten out about the escape and armed police agents along with slave catchers were waiting for the freedom seekers on the Illinois shore. In the predawn hours of Monday morning, May 21, the confrontation quickly turned into a firefight, and at least five of the freedom seekers were taken back to St. Louis in chains.  Within a few days, authorities had also arrested Breckenridge, Burrows and Meachum.

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1859 John Doy Rescue

In the early morning hours of January 25, 1859, three white abolitionists, two free blacks and a group of 11 Missouri freedom seekers left Lawrence, Kansas on a dangerous mission. Led by self-anointed “Doctor” John Doy, an Englishman who had recently settled in the Kansas Territory, the African Americans were attempting to reach at least Iowa. But suddenly a posse of slave catchers ambushed the freedom seekers and dragged them back to Missouri. There, proslavery authorities convicted Doy under state law, though abolitionists later rescued Doy from prison in dramatic fashion.

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1861-1865: Wartime Stampedes

The stampede terminology also dominated newspaper coverage during periods of the Civil War.  For example, the flight of contraband slaves in the spring and summer of 1861, outside of places such as Union-held Fort Monroe on the Virginia peninsula, generated dozens of stampede headlines. When the first Confederate officer confronted Union General Benjamin Butler’s demanding the return of three of his runaway slaves, the former Democratic politician from Massachusetts easily determined that he would not attempt to honor the Fugitive Slave Law.  Eventually, after the War Department endorsed the idea that such enslaved people could be treated as “contraband of war,” hundreds of black Virginians began showing up behind Union lines.

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1861 Springfield Stampede

On Friday, November 8, 1861 “as if by preconcerted movement,” more than 150 enslaved Missourians escaped into Lane’s camp in a “great stampede.” Men, women, young children, and “whole families” found refuge with the Kansas Brigade. Another ten months would elapse before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which famously exempted loyal states such as Missouri. But early in the war enslaved Missourians were already seizing opportunities to “stampede” into Union lines, where they found growing numbers of northern soldiers willing to help them claim freedom.

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1862 Loutre Island Stampede

In November 1862, Union soldiers guarding a vital bridge crossing near Hermann, Missouri opened their lines to allow “a stampede of slaves” from nearby Loutre Island to pass through. Once behind Union lines, the group of enslaved Missourians believed they had finally realized their hard-won freedom. But their slaveholders still asserted that the Union’s various antislavery policies did not change anything for “loyal” slaveholders from states like Missouri which had rejected secession. When three slaveholders recaptured the freedom seekers and placed them in the county jail in Hermann, local antislavery German residents threatened to break open the jail. Department of the Missouri commander Maj. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis quickly appointed a new provost marshal for Hermann who released the freedom seekers under the Second Confiscation Act.