The knock on Samuel Green’s door must have felt inevitable. It was April 1857, and in the past decade hundreds of Black Marylanders had slipped off the farms and plantations where they were enslaved. Now local white leaders were beginning to suspect that Green knew more about the runaways than he let on. Green was a free Black man who lived in a cottage in Dorchester County, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, where he farmed a modest plot and preached the word of God. Opening his door that April evening, Green came face to face with the law. “You are suspected of holding correspondence with the North,” a county sheriff told him, “and I shall search your house.”
The sheriff and his posse soon found what they were looking for: a letter from Green’s son, Sam Jr.; a map of Canada; railroad schedules for northbound trains; and a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s blockbuster antislavery novel, published five years earlier. None of the items proved that Green had helped usher anyone to freedom—but the book turned out to be sufficiently incriminating. Green was placed under arrest. Then he was charged, under an obscure Maryland law, with possessing an “abolition pamphlet” that could “create discontent amongst the people of color of this state.” As he sat in a jail cell, awaiting his trial, state prosecutors began to craft an ominous argument: A person caught reading the wrong kind of book deserved to be locked away.
It was no accident that Green’s unprecedented case unfolded in Maryland, where slavery’s position at the center of American life was at its most tenuous. Maryland had the largest free Black population of any state in the nation. It was also the state from which the greatest number of people fled slavery, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who may have been a distant relative of Green’s, among them. Trapped between the slavery-powered economy of the South and the industrial North, Black people in Maryland had long negotiated freedom however they could. During the Revolutionary War, enslaved Marylanders escaped to British ships anchored in the Chesapeake Bay after Virginia’s colonial governor, Lord Dunmore, offered emancipation to enslaved people who defected to the British Army.
