Freedom by Any Means
Con Games, Voodoo Schemes, True Love and Lawsuits on the Underground Railroad
THE BIG BLUFFNo one yelled for the sheriff when a free black man named John Bowley showed up at a Maryland slave auction in December 1850. To the small crowd at the Dorchester County courthouse, Bowley was just another black man saying good- bye to the enslaved family he was about to lose. But the thirty-four-year- old husband and father hadn't come to the courthouse to smell his children's fear or kiss their tears. He hadn't come to watch his wife shrivel up either -- all her green hopes gone -- as a slave trader hauled her away. He wasn't that kind of man. He was a man who could build a ship from prime white oak and tar, pegs and passion, and then make it dance with him across the sea. The kind of man who could sail through storms and laugh at the wind. He brought no cash to the sale of his wife and children on the steps of the old brick courthouse in Cambridge, Maryland, but he brought something equally powerful.
He brought a plan.
His scheme would have made a riverboat gambler grin, drag his chair to the nearest poker table and prepa ... read full excerpt from: Freedom by Any Means: Con Games, Voodoo Schemes, True Love and Lawsuits on the Underground Railroad ebook
