Imperfect Freedom: The Failed Plot to Kidnap John Felix White

Abstract

Imperfect Freedom: The Failed Plot to Kidnap John Felix White Carol E. Mull (bio) In the fall of 1847, John Felix White labored on a farm in southeast Michigan, some three hundred miles from the place he had been enslaved since age two. A few years earlier, he fled Kentucky with assistance from activists who directed him toward Canada. He found little joy in freedom, however, envisioning his wife and children still suffering in slavery, and decided to resettle in Michigan. With every strike of the hoe and swing of the scythe, he sought to fund his family’s rescue, unaware that the Kentuckian who planned to carry him to the New Orleans slave market had tracked him northward, determined to derail the seemingly impenetrable networks protecting self-emancipators in the Great Lakes region.1 White’s escape, near-kidnapping, rescues, and continued involvement with the Underground Railroad add to our understanding of the transnational antislavery movement in Michigan and beyond. It begins with White’s horrific choice between being sold far from his young wife and children or making a risky permanent escape. He chose the latter. His initial flight from Kentucky started with protection from free Blacks in Indiana and ended in a Black settlement in Canada West (contemporary Ontario). The corroborating accounts of famed abolitionists Rev. Levi Coffin and Laura Smith Haviland describe White’s conveyance northward along an established interracial network from the Ohio River borderlands to the Detroit River borderlands.2 [End Page 67] The attempt in late 1847 to forcibly take White back into bondage reveals the escalation of proslavery activism beyond the border states. Following kidnapping attempts in Marshall, Detroit, and Cass County, slaveholders made another foray to Raisin, Michigan, to capture White. The men who schemed to forcibly kidnap him could rely on associations that funded retrieval of their “Servants.” Proslavery advocates in southern border states created associations to recapture self-emancipators. A stated object of the Kenton County Association was “the security of our Servants, and the recovery of such as may be absconded from their masters or owners.” Politically, they sought a stronger federal fugitive slave law that would curtail free states’ resistance.3 The men who expected to capture and return White must have been mystified to discover farmers in rural Michigan protecting a runaway. The reach of practical abolitionism extended far beyond Michigan’s major cities to small towns and rural properties, such as Watkins Farm.4 Before the Civil War, prominent self-emancipators—such as Josiah Henson and Henry Bibb—wrote autobiographical accounts of their attempts to rescue family from bondage. White’s story, penned by others after Emancipation, specified people by name, providing the means for a full investigation. White was described as an esteemed friend. He gained an education, worked and saved, and maintained friendships with those who aided him in his initial escape. White took charge of his future, rebuffing every suggestion that created distance from his family, and continually prevailed on abolitionists Levi Coffin and Laura Haviland to support his desperate recovery strategies. He twice persuaded Haviland to risk travel into Kentucky, while a bounty for her arrest could have led to a lengthy prison term. White financed, planned, and initiated the liberation of his family on the Ohio River borderlands. He enlisted Black and White friends in careful, clandestine preparations. Of course, he could not plan for the weather.5 [End Page 68] John White and the Transnational Great Lakes Network to Freedom White was born into bondage in Virginia and enslaved in northern Kentucky from the age of two. He was known as Felix during the twenty-five years he described as being “whipped up,” rather than “raised up.”6 Despite severe limitations on his freedom, the young man formed a relationship with Jennie [Jane] Stephens, who lived nearby, and they bore four children by 1845. Jennie was raised on the farm of Benjamin Stephens Jr., her legal possessor and reputed father, in the rural hamlet of Rabbit Hash in Boone County. In 1840, Stephens held nineteen people, including Jennie and her children, enslaved on his property.7 It was the fate of the enslaved to face sudden, horrific changes. The...