ABSTRACT
The members of Philadelphia’s black community hardly needed to be alerted to the risk of enslavement. Philadelphians considered themselves particularly at risk in view of the city’s proximity to the slave state of Delaware. Outside Philadelphia’s black community, only the members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society displayed real concern over the issue of kidnapping. In the late spring and summer of 1825 the Philadelphia authorities began to receive more than the usual number of inquiries concerning the disappearance of young blacks. Black and white Philadelphians may have been “highly aroused” by the revelations of kidnapping in their city, but moral indignation could not change the climate which made kidnapping possible. As the Northern black community was enlarged by the arrival of fugitives, so free blacks were continually being ferried to the plantations of the lower South and sold as slaves. In effect, there were two quite distinct “underground railroads.”
