Samuel Green (freedman)
A conductor of the Underground Railroad, he was tried and convicted in 1857 of possessing a copy of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe following the Dover Eight incident.
He received a ten-year sentence, and was pardoned by the Governor of Maryland Augustus Bradford in 1862, after he served five years.
After the American Civil War, he co-founded and worked at the Centenary Biblical Institute (now Morgan State University).
When his enslaver, Henry Nicholas, died in 1832, a provision in his will provided that Green should be freed after five more years of servitude:[1][2][a] It is my will and desire that my negro man Sam Green, be sold for a term of five years and my negro man Daniel for a term of ten years, and to have the liberty to choose Masters, and after the expiration of said terms I do hereby manumit and set them free.Green became a blacksmith, which allowed him to earn and save money after his work day.
Concerned that free blacks would help enslaved people escape, laws were enacted that limited their civil rights.
[4] After Green was freed, he worked as a farmer and as a lay minister or exhorter in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Dorchester County, Maryland.
[12] Green's reputation grew in stature in both the African-American and white communities of Dorchester County.
In 1852, he served as a delegate to the Convention of the Free Colored People of Maryland in Baltimore,[1] where he resisted efforts to encourage emigration to Africa.
He and his wife attended 1855 National Convention of Colored Citizens of the United States, held at Franklin Hall in Philadelphia,[2] as a delegate from Maryland.
He met prominent Northern black abolitionists there, including Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frederick Douglass, Jacob Gibbs, Stephen Myers, William Cooper Nell, Charles Lenox Remond, and John Rock.
Green traveled to Canada to visit his son and made plans to move there with his wife.
He found his way to the Philadelphia office of William Still, prominent in the Underground Railroad,[2][6] who recorded the facts about Green's escape.
Green traveled to New York City and then was guided to Canada,[6] the town of Salford in Ontario.
[6] Green, who lived in East New Market, provided assistance to the Dover Eight during their escape from Bucktown, Maryland.
[14] He was suspected to have been involved in the incident and Sheriff Robert Bell searched his house after Green returned from a trip to visit his son in Canada.
[15] Charles F. Goldsborough prosecuted the case against Green in a two-week trial in a Dorchester County, Maryland court.
[2][15] Unable to find direct evidence of Green's involvement in the Underground Railroad, Goldsborough argued that Uncle Tom's Cabin was "insurrectionary in intent."
[2] He was acquitted of being in possession of "abolition papers of an inflammatory character," but was found guilty of the felony charge of possessing "a certain abolition pamphlet called 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' ... calculated to create discontent amongst the colored population,'"[2] based upon Chapter 272 of the Act of 1841 of Maryland, which stated that "if any free Negroes or mulatto knowingly have in his or her possession any abolition handbill, pamphlet, newspaper, pictorial representation or other paper of an inflammatory character, having a tendency to create discontent amongst or stir up to insurrection the people of color in this state, he or she shall be deemed guilty of felony."
"[18] In March 1862, Governor Augustus Bradford pardoned Green under the condition that he left the state within 60 days.
[2] When he was freed, his story was of interest to fellow abolitionists and Green made speeches along the East Coast of the United States.
