Solomon Northup's Kindred: The Kidnapping of Free Citizens before the Civil War by David Fiske

Author:David Fiske [Fiske, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2016-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

PETER JOHN LEE

Though Peter John Lee was usually described as a fugitive slave who escaped from Virginia with a number of others in 1833, his wife said that he had actually been a freeman there but decided to move to the North after being badly harassed.281 His northern neighbors believed he was free, also.282 In 1833, a number of men stole a boat in Northampton, Virginia, and traveled to New York. Afterward, the governor of Virginia requested that New York governor William L. Marcy locate 17 men involved in the incident and turn them over to Edward R. Waddy for transportation back to Virginia. There, they would be tried for theft of the vessel. It is significant that the men were requisitioned as fugitives from justice, and not as escaped slaves. (If Lee was indeed free, as his wife claimed, he may have taken the lead in the escape, deciding to liberate some slaves as well as remove himself from a place where he had been persecuted.)283

Marcy’s warrant was remarkably imprecise.284 Many of the alleged participants in the theft of the boat were identified only by first name. The warrant required any law enforcement officials throughout the state to look for the men and to turn them over to Waddy. One man, who was returned to Virginia not long after the incident, was tried and sentenced to be hung. Instead, he was pardoned and sent away as a slave—suggesting that the motive was the return of slaves, rather than the apprehension and punishment of felons.285

For several years after his arrival in New York, Lee lived as a free man. He gained employment with Seth Lyon, a Connecticut justice of the peace, and lived in Byram, Connecticut, at the state line with New York.286 Lee had a wife and the couple had two children and reportedly were happy.

On November 20, 1836, he received word that an acquaintance of his wanted to see him in Rye, New York, a place he sometimes visited.287 Once in New York State, Lee was grabbed by a group of men, perhaps as many as 12.288 Among them were Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash, both New York City officials: Boudinot was a constable, and Nash was a police marshal.289 Both men had developed reputations for catching runaway slaves and also for abducting free citizens on the pretext that they were fugitive slaves.290

Lee was gagged, tied up, and quickly taken away in a wagon. The party stopped at a Mamaroneck tavern on the way to New York, where Lee was treated to some liquor.291 The next day, without any sort of official proceeding,292 the captured man was put on board a ship bound for Virginia. There, he was put on trial and sentenced to hanging, but was instead turned over to a slaveholder, said to be his master.293

Due to the fact that Lee was arrested as an escaped felon rather than as a fugitive slave,294 that the crime he was accused of had occurred over three years

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