Thomas Sims: Returned to Slavery From Boston in 1851, Free by Dug-Out Boat in 1863

After no one bought Sims in Charleston, the slave trader sent him to New Orleans to be sold (Library of Congress).

In April 1851 Boston guarded its courthouse with chains, guards and a militia at nearby Faneuil Hall to keep one man from being rescued, and then marched him to the waterfront among 300 armed police, city watch and others with swords drawn. The man was Thomas Sims, who had stowed away on a ship from Georgia weeks earlier and was now being returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law. This National Park Service account follows his long road: slavery in Georgia, a few weeks of freedom in Boston, years of being sold across the South, and a second escape during the Civil War. Boston, where a tightly knit free Black community supported many people escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad, was both where Sims reached freedom and the place he was sent back from.

Georgia to Boston

Born in the early 1830s in Chatham County, Georgia, Sims was enslaved by the rice planter James Potter. In the ten years before his escape he lived in Savannah with his mother and worked as a bricklayer, turning his wages over to Potter. In February 1851 he secretly boarded a brig, the M. and J.C. Gilmore, as it headed north. Nobody on board found him during the two-week voyage, but near Boston Light in Boston Harbor a mate caught him, and the captain locked him in a cabin. Sims escaped the cabin, stole a boat and made his way to South Boston, and soon moved into a boarding house for Black seamen on Ann Street.

Arrest and hearing

Agents for Potter came to Boston and enlisted U.S. Marshal Charles Devens and other authorities to return Sims under the Fugitive Slave Law. They arrested him, though he wounded one of the officers in the struggle, and held him in the courthouse. The rescue of Shadrach Minkins less than two months earlier left them taking no chances, so they draped the courthouse in chains, stationed numerous guards in and around it and garrisoned a militia at Faneuil Hall. The abolitionist lawyer Richard Henry Dana was moved to exclaim that the temple of justice had become a slave pen. Knowing an attack on the courthouse was impossible, abolitionists planned to lay mattresses outside and have Sims leap from his third-floor window, but Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled his sinking heart on seeing masons put iron bars on the window of Sims' cell, which frustrated the plan.

At his hearing Sims said he would not go back to slavery. Commissioner George Ticknor Curtis nonetheless ruled for the claimant and remanded Sims to Potter. To avoid a daytime procession that would likely draw a large and angry crowd, authorities escorted Sims to a waiting ship in the early hours of April 12. With the mayor and the U.S. Marshal present, 300 armed police, city watch and others formed a hollow square around him and marched him with swords drawn down State Street to Long Wharf, while roughly one hundred abolitionists followed to the waterfront crying “Shame! Shame!” and asking aloud “Where is Liberty?” He was put aboard the brig Acorn without incident, and it quickly sailed for Savannah. J.W.C. Pennington, an abolitionist minister who had himself fled slavery, wrote that such cases are enough to break one's heart, and that “the whole land is full of blood.”

Back to slavery

Potter sent Sims to Charleston to be sold by a slave trader (Library of Congress).

In Savannah, Potter had Sims publicly whipped thirty-nine times and sent him to prison for three months, until the prison physician told Potter that Sims would die if he stayed much longer. Potter released him, and once he recovered hired him out again as a bricklayer, with his wages going to Potter. Mistreated by his new boss, Sims asked to be sold, and Potter sent him to the slave pens in Charleston, South Carolina, on consignment to a slave trader named Mordecai. When no one wanted to buy Sims, Mordecai bought him and sent him to New Orleans to be sold. A slaveholder and mason bought him there and took him to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where Sims worked as a bricklayer for the next ten or eleven years. In 1859 he wrote from Vicksburg to his sister, who lived in Boston's Black community on Beacon Hill, hoping to reach Boston again one day and join his friends there in the struggle for his right to freedom.

In Vicksburg Sims continued to work as a bricklayer while enslaved (Library of Congress).

The second escape

During the Civil War, in late April or May 1863, Sims, his wife and child, and three other men escaped from Vicksburg in a dug-out boat. He met General Ulysses S. Grant, gave details of the Confederate fortifications and manpower he had seen, and received permission to pass through Union lines to Boston. There he moved in with his sister on Garden Street and began speaking to northern audiences eager to hear his story, including at Boston's Tremont Temple on May 6, 1863. On May 28 he watched the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Black regiments of the Civil War, march out of the city down the same street on which heavily armed officers had once escorted him back to slavery.

Sims traveled to Nashville to recruit soldiers for Black Massachusetts regiments (Library of Congress).

Sims did not serve as a soldier, but he used his celebrity to recruit men for Black Massachusetts regiments in Huntsville, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee. A Lowell newspaper called him a quiet, energetic recruiting agent for the very government that had once used all its power to return him to slavery, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper marveled that the fugitive carried down State Street was recruiting Black troops for Massachusetts in Huntsville in March 1865, which anyone predicting four years earlier would have been thought mad to say. Sims and his family later settled in Nashville.

Sims lived the rest of his life with his family in Washington, D.C. (Library of Congress).

By 1877 Sims and his family had moved to Washington, D.C., where U.S. Attorney General Charles Devens, who as U.S. Marshal in Boston had helped arrest him, hired him as a messenger in the Department of Justice. Sims lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity there and died in 1902.

Sources

• National Park Service, “The Whole Land is Full of Blood”: The Thomas Sims Case, Boston African American National Historic Site; rewritten in hubnx's own words.