On April 18, 1923, Sarah H. Gilbert presented a paper before the Buckingham Women’s Club on the subject of the former-slaves who once lived in Buckingham, which was one of the most active Underground Railroad hubs in Bucks County, and where many fugitives decided to permanently settle. During the peak years of Underground Railroad activity the black population of Buckingham more than doubled, increasing from seventy-seven black residents on the 1830 Census to 172 black residents in 1850. Many of them settled in the vicinity of Buckingham Mountain, very close to Gilbert’s home. Other people who were liberated by the Civil War also moved to Buckingham afterwards, joining the native-born African Americans and former Underground Railroad fugitives already living there.
Sarah H. Gilbert was born in 1858 and grew up in a Quaker family in Holicong, where her father owned the tannery. William H. Johnson, one of the most active Underground Railroad conductors in the county and a leader in the abolitionist movement, lived a short walk from her house on Holicong Road. Mount Gilead African Methodist Episcopal Church was a little further down the road, about a mile from Gilbert’s home. While she was only two years old when the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to the predation of slave hunters and effectively secured the status of local fugitives, she grew up among both abolitionists and former slaves, some of whom lived with and worked for her family. She and her friends and family were intimately acquainted with the ex-slaves of Buckingham, making her an almost uniquely valuable source on the matter.
I first came across this paper while reviewing a draft of Patricia Mervine and Joseph Coleman’s book Slavery, Friends, and Freedom in Bucks County in 2024. As someone who has been researching Bucks County’s African American history for well over a decade—with a drive that might be characterized as obsessive—I immediately recognized it as a remarkable document from the excerpts that they quoted, and pulled the original from the vault to learn more. Sure enough, it proved to be one of the most valuable sources on the subject, and I am thankful to Pat and Joe for pointing me to a document that had somehow eluded me until then.
I immediately transcribed it to share it with the world, but I didn’t want to scoop them by publishing it before their book came out so I am just getting around to posting it now. In the same manuscript collection, I also found and transcribed an earlier paper Gilbert had written about one former slave named Charles Sellers, which was partially adapted for “Ex-Slaves in Buckingham.” That dates to 1876, when she was a student at Millersville State Teachers’ College, and seems like it may have been written as a school assignment (the title “A Biography” on the verso of the packet of loose leaf pages suggests the prompt). Both transcriptions are included below.
“Ex-Slaves in Buckingham” is remarkable for a few reasons. Most importantly, it is one of the only detailed accounts of the Underground Railroad in Bucks County that is based on first-hand knowledge of people who knew the former fugitives and Underground Railroad conductors. It speaks to former slaves’ lives, their personalities, their paths to freedom, and how they adapted to their new status as free people. The only comparable document I’ve come across is Edward H. Magill’s “When Men Were Sold, Reminiscences of the Underground Railroad in Bucks County and its Managers,” which provides more detail about the mechanics of the Underground Railroad but focuses less on the fugitives themselves. Until I found Gilbert’s paper, many of the people mentioned within it were little more than names that I had found on census records, tax lists, or headstones at Mount Gilead, but knew almost nothing about.
One of the most immediately exciting elements was that she confirmed the evidence I had already gathered indicating that the famous Underground Railroad fugitive Benjamin “Big Ben” Jones owned property on the west end of Buckingham Mountain. Back in 2016 I found an unrecorded deed for a small plot of land in the black community that was located there, which he had purchased from another black family. This strongly suggested that it was him, but with a name as common as Benjamin Jones I couldn’t be sure, and there was a white Benjamin Jones living in Buckingham at that time. Gilbert reports that Jones “had been living peacefully somewhere around the end of the mountain for some time when his old master unexpectedly came up from the South to reclaim him.” He first purchased the land in 1838, sold it to another black family in 1839, and bought it back in 1842, two years before his capture by slave hunters. The time period and location in Gilbert’s account match the property records, confirming that it was in fact the Benjamin Jones. I plan to write more on that in the future after doing some additional research.
Gilbert’s papers are also remarkable for how blatantly racist they are, particularly her biography of Charles Sellers. Her physical description of him is especially noxious, comparing him to “a great mastiff, or a well-kept draught-horse,” and saying, “His broad, flat nose suggests the Knickerbocker theory of that feature of his race, that when God made the black man, so pleased was he with the result of his labors that he laid his hand upon him, but too soon, thus flattening his nose.” She also goes to great lengths to belittle his struggle to gain literacy as an adult, to a point that it seems cruel. In “Ex-Slaves in Buckingham” she uses a vile racial epithet, allegedly quoting a former slave. Throughout both papers she takes a paternalistic attitude, treating her subjects as quaint and “picturesque,” and using the diminutive forms of their names (Billy, Tommy, etc.), a disrespectful practice with a long tradition. Despite her own obvious racial bias, she takes aim at racial prejudice in the closing paragraphs, hoping that Buckingham “may be kept remote from the sinister influences that tend to set the two races at enmity.” The lack of self-awareness is striking.
While I am not surprised by the paternalistic attitude, I did not expect this level of racism from a highly educated Quaker writing in 1923, who grew up in a community that was generally quite friendly towards African Americans. I guess perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. In the context of a deeply racist culture, even the relatively enlightened can still hold abhorrent views. My own great-grandfather was on the board of trustees at George School, and my grandfather told me about the time he came home from a meeting absolutely furious because they had debated whether or not to admit their first black student. He couldn’t believe that as Quakers, who were supposed to believe in radical equality, his fellow board members thought that rejecting applicants due to their race was even a possibility. That was in the early 1940s, twenty years after Gilbert presented her paper.