Shadrach minkins biography of christopher

Early Years

The son of an enslaved man named David and an unnamed mother, Minkins was born into slavery in Norfolk and answered to the name Sherwood until he was a young man.

As the eventual Civil War proved, the compromise did little to assuage the animosity. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had just been passed, forcing every state, free or not, to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves. Minkins died in Montreal on December 13, 1875. It would serve as a benefit for five newly arrived fugitive slaves, including “Shadrack,” who would “relate the circumstances of his wonderful Escape from Boston.” Minkins worked several jobs in Montreal and opened multiple restaurants, all of which failed.

From Cambridge, Hayden, Smith, and Minkins traveled to Concord, where Minkins stayed several hours with Francis Edwin Bigelow and his wife, Ann Bigelow. Frances Drake proclaimed later that she “had the honor of sheltering Shadrach when his pursuers were searching for him.”

Because the Fugitive Slave Act demanded the cooperation of free states, Canada became Minkins’ most promising option.

In March 1856, Rebecca Jones, a Norfolk slave who escaped to Boston by ship, told abolitionists that her husband had escaped in 1850 “in company with the noted fugitive, ‘Shadrach.'”

In Boston

After arriving in Boston, Minkins happened to see William H. Parks, a white man who had worked with him at R.

S. Hutchings and Company in Norfolk. With some help, he composed a letter, dated February 28, 1851, thanking his supporters in Boston for their help in his escape, and it was printed first in the Boston Commonwealth and then in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper North Star. Conservative papers in the North, especially those that supported the Compromise of 1850, of which the Fugitive Slave Act was a crucial part, also reacted unfavorably.

In May 1850, at the age of 33, he made a daring escape northward to Boston, a city that, while technically free, was still divided between the ideals of liberty and the demands of slaveholding states.

In Boston, Minkins found work as a waiter at a coffeehouse and lived quietly, blending into the city’s bustling Black community. Inside the courthouse, lawyers filed desperate motions to free Minkins, but the Chief Justice rejected their petition.

Then came the moment that would forever etch Shadrach Minkins’ name in history.

As the hearing continued inside, a crowd of determined men, mostly Black Bostonians, some with their faces half-covered by coats and hats, stormed into the courtroom.

Francis Bigelow then drove Minkins west to Leominster, and from there the Underground Railroad guided him to Fitchburg, to New Hampshire and Vermont, and finally into Canada.

Reaction to Escape

Minkins’s escape caused an uproar in Boston and across the country.

He mentioned his poor health and the severe weather he had endured on his journey north before signing himself “Frederick Minkins.” He adopted the last name for his new life in Canada and soon paired it with his previous first name, Shadrach.

On March 13, the Montreal Pilot advertised the final concert of the Real Ethiopian Serenaders, a black singing group from Philadelphia.

Minkins settled in Boston, Massachusetts (a Free State), where he became a waiter. The papers estimated Minkins’s age to be twenty-five or twenty-six, his height five-feet-seven, his complexion “bacon color,” and his build “stout” and “square.”

Caphart sought and received an arrest warrant from George T.

Curtis, a designated federal commissioner who would later serve as co-counsel to Dred Scott in his appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. By 1853 he had married an Irish woman named Mary, last name unknown, and the couple had four children: Eda and William, both of whom died young, and Mary and Jacob. In a burst of chaos and courage, they overpowered the marshals, wrestled Minkins from their grip, and carried him out into the streets.

Witnesses later said the men moved like a single force, silent, focused, unstoppable.

After leaving the Drakes, he continued on through New Hampshire and Vermont, then crossed the Saint Lawrence River to arrive in Montreal.

With his newfound freedom, Minkins began a career as a waiter and barber. For a moment, he tasted the freedom he had risked everything to gain.

But Minkins’ fragile peace was shattered later that same year.

He eventually settled in Montreal, where he began life afresh.