Reverse Underground Railroad

The Reverse Underground Railroad is the term used for the pre-American Civil War practice of kidnapping free blacks from free states and transporting them into the slave states for sale as slaves. The Reverse Underground Railroad operated for eighty-five years, from 1780-1865. The name is a reference to the Underground Railroad, the informal network of abolitionists and sympathizers who helped to smuggle escaped slaves to freedom, generally in Canada.

From 1811-1829, Martha "Patty" Cannon was the leader of a gang that kidnapped slaves and free blacks, from the Delmarva Peninsula of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Chesapeake Bay and transported and sold them to plantation owners located further south. She was indicted for four murders in 1829 and died in prison, while awaiting trial, purportedly a suicide via arsenic poisoning.

In the 1820s-1830s, John A. Murrell led an outlaw gang in western Tennessee. He was once caught with a freed slave living on his property. His tactics were to kidnap slaves from their plantations, promise them their freedom, and instead sell them back to other slave owners. If Murrell was in danger of being caught with kidnapped slaves, he would kill the slaves to escape being arrested with stolen property. In 1834, Murrell was sentenced to ten years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary for slave-stealing.

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