Border Crossings And Wealth
26. William Ellis was a slave born in Texas who crossed into Mexico, where slavery was outlawed, and became a millionaire. Later, he tried to bring African Americans to Mexico and also served as a United States diplomat to the King of Ethiopia.
27. Lewis Williams was an escaped slave who avoided being taken back by exchanging places with a body double during his crowded trial and then disguising himself as a woman to leave town. A reverend helped him by dressing him as his “daughter” with a veil and bonnet, then escorting him out of town.
28. Female slaves in the American South chewed cotton root to end pregnancies, which reduced the number of slave children born.
29. Solomon Northup, a free African American living in New York in the 1800s, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. As an enslaved person, he had no way to testify in his own case. He stayed enslaved for 12 years before he was finally freed. He then wrote the memoir “Twelve Years A Slave.”
30. Henry “Box” Brown escaped slavery in 1849 by sending himself inside a wooden crate from Virginia to Pennsylvania, a free state.
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