"Enticed!" The Underground Railroad Activities of William Holman Jones and Wright Maudlin in Kentucky
Kentucky slave owners often accused white abolitionists of enticing enslaved people to run away from their bondage. Singling out white abolitionists as the masterminds of escapes enabled southerners to maintain the illusion of slavery as a positive good, from which no bondsperson would desire to flee. White abolitionists, therefore, could be held responsible for disrupting the southern way of life and for inciting dissatisfaction among the enslaved, thereby protecting slave owners from moral accountability. The slave owners’ accusations were empty rhetoric, argue modern historians, given that most enslaved people escaped of their own volition and by their own wits and wherewithal. Liberation most often came from “self-emancipation.”
In between rhetoric and reality, however, lies another truth. On occasion, white abolitionists, from within Kentucky’s borders, resisted slavery and assisted escapes. Famous examples include Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbanks, who helped the Lewis Hayden family escape from Lexington. Laura Haviland disguised herself as “Aunt Smith” in attempt to escort Jane White from Boone County and Edward J. “Patrick” Doyle led 48 well-armed freedom seekers out of bondage from the Bluegrass Region. But among the most successful white Underground Railroad men to infiltrate Kentucky were two lesser known abolitionists. According to the 1882 Cass County, Michigan history, William Holman Jones and Wright Maudlin “made frequent trips to the Ohio River, and sometimes to Kentucky soil, for the purpose of assisting and guiding fugitives to freedom.” Their actions led to the 1847 “Kentucky Raid” and increased southern agitation for a new fugitive slave law. This is their story.
Dr. Debian Marty is a professor in the Division of Humanities & Communication at California State University Monterey Bay. She has authored numerous articles on the Underground Railroad network in southwestern Michigan. Most recent is the chapter, “One More River to Cross: The Crosswhites’ Escape from Slavery,” in V. Tucker and K. S. Frost (Eds.), A Fluid Frontier: Freedom, Slavery and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (2016).
In between rhetoric and reality, however, lies another truth. On occasion, white abolitionists, from within Kentucky’s borders, resisted slavery and assisted escapes. Famous examples include Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbanks, who helped the Lewis Hayden family escape from Lexington. Laura Haviland disguised herself as “Aunt Smith” in attempt to escort Jane White from Boone County and Edward J. “Patrick” Doyle led 48 well-armed freedom seekers out of bondage from the Bluegrass Region. But among the most successful white Underground Railroad men to infiltrate Kentucky were two lesser known abolitionists. According to the 1882 Cass County, Michigan history, William Holman Jones and Wright Maudlin “made frequent trips to the Ohio River, and sometimes to Kentucky soil, for the purpose of assisting and guiding fugitives to freedom.” Their actions led to the 1847 “Kentucky Raid” and increased southern agitation for a new fugitive slave law. This is their story.
Dr. Debian Marty is a professor in the Division of Humanities & Communication at California State University Monterey Bay. She has authored numerous articles on the Underground Railroad network in southwestern Michigan. Most recent is the chapter, “One More River to Cross: The Crosswhites’ Escape from Slavery,” in V. Tucker and K. S. Frost (Eds.), A Fluid Frontier: Freedom, Slavery and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (2016).