John H. Wheeler

Wheeler gained national attention as a central figure in an 1855 legal case that tested the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Pennsylvania was a free state, and enslaved Jane Johnson and her two sons walked away from Wheeler in Philadelphia, while he and his family were en route to New York City and a voyage to Nicaragua.

[1] Passmore Williamson, the abolitionist who aided her in claiming her freedom, was charged with a federal crime and held indefinitely in prison.

He gained a patronage position under President Andrew Jackson, who appointed Wheeler as superintendent of the federal mint in Charlotte, North Carolina (1837–1841).

There, he officially recognized the government of William Walker, an American adventurer who had invaded the country with a small force, intending to take it over.

Wheeler read widely and had a large library in his plantation house, containing works by prominent English writers, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and others.

A partial listing includes Wheatley's Memoir and Poems; Martin R. Delany's Official Report of the Niger River Valley Exploring Party; The Life of Noah Davis, a Colored Man; The Refugee, or Narrative of Fugitive Slaves in Canada; Narrative of the Suffering of Lewis and Milton Clarke; Austin Steward's Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman; The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave; Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom and Narrative of a Life.

Gates writes that: In addition, Wheeler's library contained several significant abolitionist texts by white authors, like Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman and Lydia Maria Child's Freedman's Book, alongside racist texts like Negrophobia 'On the Brain' in White Men, by J. R. Hayes, and John Campbell's Negromania, the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Man.

[8]In his own work, Wheeler wrote or edited several books on North Carolina state history and its prominent European-American men, which are listed below.

"[1] The case attracted national attention after white abolitionist Passmore Williamson, an officer of the Society, was jailed for contempt of court for refusing to tell where Johnson was hidden.

[1] Hannah Bond, a literate slave who served Wheeler's wife Ellen as a lady's maid, escaped about 1857 from their North Carolina plantation in Lincoln County.

[8] Her references in her novel to the Wheeler family, and to Jane Johnson's gaining freedom in Philadelphia, provided details that helped historians establish Bond's identity.