Brought here.

Into the rivers

The first Africans recorded in English Virginia arrived by water. In 1619, about twenty were landed at Point Comfort from the ship White Lion. For the next several decades most came by way of the West Indies. Direct voyages from Africa grew in the late 1600s. Imports to the Chesapeake peaked in the 1720s and stayed high for decades after.⁠⁴

Across the whole era, historians working from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database count roughly 130,000 to 140,000 Africans brought into the Chesapeake. Most of the documented voyages landed in Virginia's rivers.⁠⁴ For Maryland, the Maryland State Archives gives its own count in its Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland: fewer than 1,000 Africans arrived between 1619 and 1697, and nearly 100,000 in the three quarters of a century before the Revolution.⁠³

One voyage is well documented. The Lord Ligonier left the Gambia River on July 5, 1767, with about 140 captives, and reached Annapolis on September 29. Fewer than 100 survived the crossing. Alex Haley later identified the ship as the one that carried his ancestor Kunta Kinte, a link that rests on his own research.⁠¹⁶

The trade turns around

Virginia banned the import of enslaved people in 1778.⁠²⁰ Maryland followed in 1783, barring anyone from bringing enslaved people into the state "by land or water" for sale.⁠¹⁸ Congress banned imports nationwide from January 1, 1808.⁠⁶

The ban did not end the trade on the water. It reversed its direction. Cotton and sugar plantations in the Deep South wanted labor, and the Upper South had people to sell. Baltimore became one of the leading ports shipping enslaved people south.⁠^7,8 The same 1807 law required a manifest for every coastwise voyage of 40 tons or more carrying enslaved people, listing each person by name, sex, age and height.⁠⁶ Those manifests are why so much of this trade can be traced today.

Pratt Street

The traders worked within sight of the harbor. A state historical marker at 830 East Pratt Street records more than a dozen of them on Pratt and nearby streets, between the Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Their newspaper ads ran under headlines like "5,000 Negroes Wanted."⁠¹⁰

Austin Woolfolk dominated the business by the late 1810s from a private jail on West Pratt Street, near today's Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.⁠^9,8 He shipped more than 2,000 people to New Orleans.⁠¹⁶ Hope H. Slatter kept a jail at 224 West Pratt Street from about 1838. In 1848 he sold it to Bernard Moore Campbell and his brother, and Campbell ran it until 1863.⁠^9,17 Joseph S. Donovan, who sat on the city council in 1840, ran pens at several sites, among them Woolfolk's old jail and later Camden Street.⁠^9,16

Frederick Douglass spent part of his youth enslaved in Baltimore. In 1845 he wrote that people who resisted or showed "a determination to run away" could be "sold to Austin Woolfolk, or some other slave-trader, as a warning to the slaves remaining."⁠¹

The historian Jennie K. Williams estimates that 15,000 to 20,000 people were shipped from Baltimore to New Orleans by sea between 1818 and 1860, nearly one in five of all enslaved people who reached New Orleans by ship.⁠⁷

The trade had opponents in the same streets. In 1827, Woolfolk beat the abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy on a Baltimore street and was fined one dollar.⁠⁹ In 1830, Lundy's young colleague William Lloyd Garrison was convicted of libel in Baltimore for writing that a New England shipowner carried enslaved people from Baltimore to New Orleans, and he went to jail.⁠^19,12,16

Resistance on the water

The water that carried people south also carried them toward freedom. In April 1826, people shipped by Woolfolk aboard the schooner Decatur seized the vessel at sea and threw the captain and mate overboard. Some reached shore in New York. One of them, William Bowser, was tried and hanged there.⁠¹⁶

In April 1848, 77 enslaved people boarded the schooner Pearl in Washington, D.C., and sailed down the Potomac, hoping to reach the Bay and the North. A posse on a steamboat caught them near Point Lookout. Many were sold to traders, some of them in Baltimore. Two of the captives, the sisters Mary and Emily Edmonson, were later bought out of slavery with money raised by Henry Ward Beecher's church in Brooklyn.⁠¹⁶

Douglass himself had escaped ten years earlier. He had learned to caulk ships in a Fells Point yard. On September 3, 1838, he left Baltimore dressed as a sailor, in what he later described in his 1881 memoir as "a red shirt and a tarpaulin hat and black cravat, tied in sailor fashion." He carried papers borrowed from a free Black sailor. He crossed the Susquehanna by ferry at Havre de Grace and took a steamboat from Wilmington to Philadelphia. Anna Murray, a free Black Baltimorean who had helped him prepare, joined him in New York, where they married.⁠¹

Free and enslaved, side by side

Baltimore was also home to a large and growing free Black community. In 1810 the city counted 5,671 free Black residents and 4,672 enslaved. By 1860 the numbers were 25,680 free and 2,218 enslaved, more than nine in ten Black Baltimoreans free.⁠¹⁴ The historian Christopher Phillips describes Baltimore's Black community, more than ninety percent free, as the largest in the nation at the time.⁠¹⁵ Free and enslaved people worked the same docks and shipyards, worshipped in churches such as Bethel A.M.E., in 1816 one of the founding congregations of the A.M.E. Church, and lived on the same streets.⁠^21,2

1864

The end came in stages. On July 24, 1863, Union troops under Col. William Birney emptied Campbell's jail on Pratt Street and freed the 59 people held there: 26 men, a boy, 29 women and 3 infants. The men enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops.⁠^9,17,13 In 1864 Maryland wrote a new constitution that abolished slavery. Voters ratified it on October 12 and 13 by 375 votes, with the ballots of soldiers in the field deciding the result.⁠^14,16 It took effect on November 1, 1864, before the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery nationwide.⁠¹⁴

Why this story, now

Where the accounts differ

We checked this story against archival, scholarly and public-history sources. Where they disagree, here is what we found and what we wrote.

• How many Africans were brought into the Chesapeake. The same reference gives 130,000 in one place and 140,000 in another, both drawn from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. We give the range. The Maryland State Archives puts arrivals in Maryland alone at nearly 100,000 in the 75 years before the Revolution. That is higher than the voyage database's count implies for Maryland's share of the region, and the guide does not explain its method. The database counts documented voyages only. We give both figures and say whose each is.
• How many people were shipped from Baltimore to New Orleans. Jennie K. Williams's research estimates 15,000 to 20,000 between 1818 and 1860. One summary of a related database gives 63,000, which appears to count arrivals in New Orleans from every port. We use Williams's estimate.
• Survivors of the Lord Ligonier. Sources give 96 or 98 of about 140. We say fewer than 100. Alex Haley's identification of the ship with Kunta Kinte is his own conclusion and has not been independently documented.
• Where Woolfolk's jail stood. Accounts place it at Pratt and Cove streets, between Fremont and Poppleton, or at today's Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. These describe the same stretch of West Pratt Street, changed by later roadwork.
• When Woolfolk began trading. Sources give 1815, 1816 or 1819. We say by the late 1810s.
• Slatter's name. He appears as Hope Hull Slatter and Hope Hall Slatter. We use Hope H. Slatter.
• The Pearl captives. Accounts differ on how many were sold to which Baltimore traders, from about 30 to at least 50. We do not give a number.
• The Decatur. Accounts differ on how many people were aboard and how many escaped. We do not give a number.
• Woolfolk's share. A precise count of his shipments is often repeated, but we could not trace it to the original study. We give the more cautious figure of more than 2,000.
• Who bought Slatter's jail. Sources agree on Bernard Moore Campbell and a brother but name the brother as Walter or Lewis. We do not name him.
• The 1864 vote. The constitution passed by 375 votes, and opponents at the time accused its supporters of intimidation and fraud at the polls. The soldiers' vote, 2,633 to 263, decided it either way.
• Maryland's 1783 ban. Later laws allowed exceptions, such as people moving into the state with their enslavers. It ended the legal import of enslaved people for sale, not every arrival.

Sources

Each number in the text links to the source here that supports it.

1. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), and "My Escape from Slavery," Century Magazine (1881), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), via the National Park Service
2. Bethel A.M.E. Church, history
3. Maryland State Archives, A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland (revised 2020), "The Plantation Revolution"
4. Encyclopedia Virginia, "Transatlantic Slave Trade, The," drawing on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
5. Lorena S. Walsh, "The Chesapeake Slave Trade," William and Mary Quarterly (2001)
6. National Archives, "Slave Ship Manifests"
7. Jennie K. Williams, "Trouble the Water: The Baltimore to New Orleans Coastwise Slave Trade, 1820–1860" (American Historical Association, 2018; Slavery & Abolition, 2020)
8. Calvin Schermerhorn, "What Else You Should Know About Baltimore," TIME (2015)
9. Baltimore Heritage, Baltimore's slave trade sites: Woolfolk, Slatter and Campbell, Donovan
10. Maryland Historical Trust, Baltimore slave trade marker, 830 East Pratt Street
11. Maryland Center for History and Culture, photograph of the pen at 224 to 228 Pratt Street (1910)
12. Library of Congress, A brief sketch of the trial of William Lloyd Garrison (1834)
13. Freedmen and Southern Society Project, Col. William Birney, July 13, 1863
14. Maryland State Archives, census tables for 1810 and 1860 and the 1864 Constitution
15. Christopher Phillips, Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (University of Illinois Press, 1997)
16. Wikipedia entries on the Lord Ligonier, the Decatur mutiny, the Pearl incident, the Edmonson sisters, Austin Woolfolk, Hope H. Slatter, Joseph S. Donovan, William Lloyd Garrison and the Maryland Constitution of 1864, used for details confirmed in the scholarship they cite
17. Crossroads of War, "Bernard M. Campbell, Baltimore Slave Trader in Carroll County"
18. Early Washington DC Law & Family, text of Maryland's 1783 act
19. Reading Garrison's Letters, on Garrison's libel trial in Baltimore
20. Encyclopedia Virginia, "An act for preventing the farther importation of slaves (1778)"
21. Baltimore Sun, "Preservationists are trying to save Fells Point homes that belonged to Black caulkers" (2021)