A remarkable handwritten manuscript, unearthed in a Rhode Island family’s storage, has shed light on the extraordinary life of Thomas White, an enslaved man from Maryland whose daring bid for freedom led him to reinvent himself at sea nearly 200 years ago.
According to smithsonianmag.com, when Thomas White noticed the smoke, he couldn’t imagine what it might signal. The 15-year-old had been traveling undisturbed for miles alongside what he described as “iron bars laid down on a level road.” But now, a massive, clattering machine, a cloud billowing behind it, was heading straight for him. He leapt from its path moments before it passed over the spot where he stood.
White later learned this was a train. He’d never seen one before. Before this journey, White had not strayed more than ten miles from home. Home was somewhere in pre-Civil War Maryland, where the boy had been enslaved since birth. In the time before his escape, he’d carefully collected bits and pieces of information about life outside that ten-mile radius. His owner’s son was attending college up north, and when he returned home for the holidays, he told White all about Philadelphia, where slavery had been all but abolished, and the route he’d traveled home.
White resolved to find this free city. One day, he approached a friend named Joe, who was enslaved by a cruel owner on a nearby farm, and broached the idea of running away, sharing everything he’d heard about Philadelphia. “It is to be done if we are cautious,” White said. “For I have made up my mind long ago, and I will either gain my freedom or be caught in the attempt.”
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On the night of the escape, White packed a bundle of clothes from his owner’s son’s wardrobe and threw it out the window. After collecting it from the garden, “I turned to leave the only home I had ever known,” he later recalled. “I could not restrain a tear from crying in my eyes as I looked on it for the last time. I then visited the grave of my dear mother, and on it I breathed a fervent prayer to heaven to grant me success in the perilous journey I was about to undertake.”
White saddled two horses and met up with Joe, who was becoming increasingly nervous. During the 20-mile ride to a Black farmer who had offered shelter, Joe suggested they turn around. If they gave up now, they would be back before daylight. White patted his friend on the back and said, “Come, comrade, let us be going, for there is terror ahead, but bitter punishment awaits us if we are caught.”
The farmer hid them through the night and sent them onward. With the help of abolitionists along the way, White traveled north through Delaware and Pennsylvania, escaping detection by spies and disaster courtesy of speeding locomotives. Soon after the near-collision, one of the abolitionists explained to White that the machine he’d encountered was a train. That night, at 8 p.m., the word “train” took on yet another new meaning: the vehicle that would deliver White safely to Philadelphia.
We know these details from White’s story because they’re recorded in looping cursive on more than 40 double-sided sheets of paper. They’re written in first-person, but White, who was illiterate, almost certainly didn’t write any of them himself. The narrative features three or four distinct handwriting styles, and nobody knows who they belong to.
When author Cindy Elder discovered the papers, they had been sitting for decades in storage among other historic documents on her in-laws’ screened-in porch in Barrington, Rhode Island. Many of the documents had belonged to her husband’s great-great-grandparents, James and Ruth Jenkins. After her husband’s parents died, the family started sorting through the trove. “This bundle of records has been handed down through various family members for 150 years,” says Elder.
Elder became fascinated with the Jenkinses, and she decided to turn their story into her first novel, The Journey Begins. About two years ago, after she’d written an early draft, her brother-in-law brought over two stacks of documents. The first stack held more family letters, but he wasn’t sure what was in the second stack. Maybe nothing important. “You can guess which stack I went to first,” Elder says. “The unknown stack.”
In that second stack, Elder found old receipts and newspaper articles before coming across an “unusual-looking document.” Her heart sped up as she read the first few sentences:
At the extremity of the house, it increased my sorrow very much when I thought of the situation I was in and caused many a tear to run down my cheek. I used to go and tell the members of my church how I was treated and the trifling comfort that was denied me, and they told me not to lose heart, as there was always a great many trials and troubles in the road to heaven. So I prayed to God to remove them from my road, and I waited in patience, but my heart grew weary, and all my faith was being shaken, when I made up my mind to leave at once, if I died of hunger while traveling on the road from slavery.
“My first thought was, ‘What am I reading here? Who is this? Who wrote this?’” she recalls. “And my second thought was, ‘I think this is bigger than me. I think I need help.’”
Elder reached out to scholars at her two alma maters, Roger Williams University and Brown University, both based in Rhode Island. Last summer, she brought the manuscript to Charlotte Carrington-Farmer, a scholar who specializes in early American history at Roger Williams. “I was really blown away, truthfully, by what it was, but also really nervous,” says Carrington-Farmer. “As a historian, we’re always trained to be really skeptical when new documents come to light, especially something like this particular manuscript.”
The researchers were “hopeful that [White] was a real person describing his life,” says Carrington-Farmer. But at the same time, how could they be sure they weren’t reading a work of abolitionist propaganda?
When broadly defined, surviving slave narratives include short accounts found in court records, newsletters and the thousands of oral histories collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. The number of separately published, book-length autobiographical accounts in English is often estimated at about 200, with half of these narratives written between the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the rest in the century or so that followed emancipation.
“The majority of the accounts collected are brief—a paragraph, a few pages,” says Deborah G. Plant, editor of Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumously published interviews with Oluale Kossola, a survivor of the last American slave ship. “That makes Thomas White’s newly discovered and recovered 41-page manuscript an important and even momentous find.”
Forgotten slave narratives do occasionally resurface. In 2016, literary historian Jonathan Schroeder discovered a 20,000-word text written by abolitionist John Swanson Jacobs while digging through an Australian newspaper’s online archives. With so few texts known to survive, each one is made to “carry the burden of representing the lives of ten million people who were enslaved,” Schroeder says. “These documents are so uncommon that the discovery of any one emancipation narrative is a big deal.”
At the same time, the existence of such works has long prompted questions about accuracy. Because many of the storytellers couldn’t read or write, scholars also scrutinize the influence of editors and transcribers. Plant describes White’s narrative as belonging to the “as-told-to” genre, which often prefaces the account by promising that the transcriber has relayed the subject’s voice faithfully. White’s narrative features no such addendums. But unpublished manuscripts are uniquely compelling, as they can offer a rare, unfiltered window into an enslaved individual’s mind “unaffected by editors’ advice or publishers’ preferences,” according to William Leake Andrews, a scholar of African American literature.
During his time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Andrews helped assemble a digital repository of the roughly 200 known slave narratives. But as the historian and literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. cautioned in 2014, “It’s a provisional list, because you never know what might turn up in an attic.” According to the rediscovered manuscript, White never lingered in one place long. He moved from Philadelphia to New York, where he worked a series of short stints as a cook, a door porter and a waiter. When he got restless, he decided to leave New York and travel to “the famous city of Boston,” where he met his wife. Days after his wedding, he started working as a captain’s steward, sailing first to California and then to far-flung destinations around the world.
The manuscript only mentions one full date: White said that he fled slavery on the night of March 2, 1831. But his many descriptions of locations, people and events allowed the research team to cross-reference his account with historical records. Carrington-Farmer decided to build the manuscript into one of her classes, and she enlisted a history undergraduate named Rachel Cabral to help lead the research. The class broke down into groups, each focusing on a different aspect of White’s story: For instance, one group attempted a handwriting analysis, while another searched for records of White during his enslavement in Maryland. Both of these efforts came up cold.
Carrington-Farmer also consulted with several outside researchers, who were optimistic about the manuscript’s significance. Marcus Rediker, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, thought the manuscript might have “great historical value,” as he told Elder and Carrington-Farmer in December. “You have a great treasure in your hands!” Rediker says that White recalled subjects that he himself had studied intensively, including how people escaped slavery and how abolitionists helped them, and that the account rang true “down to the finest details.”
“I read the manuscript looking for geographical and temporal consistency,” he says. “Could the things described in the manuscript have happened where and when it was said that they happened? Yes, they could have, I decided.” For example, White recalled being taken to a doctor, whom Rediker believes to be James Bias, a Black dentist who was active in Philadelphia’s abolitionist circles. And when White later returned to Maryland, he had trouble leaving as a free man, an experience that reflects what Rediker learned while writing his new book, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea.
He also looked for anachronisms, and he says he found only one: White’s use of the phrase “subterranean railway.” Some scholars have suggested that the term “underground railroad” was used no earlier than 1839 and perhaps not until 1842. But earlier this year, Timothy Walker, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, had a hunch. When the Roger Williams team sent him the manuscript, he thought everything in it seemed about ten years off. In a message to the research team, he proposed that White escaped slavery around 1841, rather than 1831, and then described his life in the 1840s and 1850s. For instance, he describes traveling to Sacramento during a major flood, and such an event did take place in the California city in January 1850.
After Walker’s “monumental email,” the researchers decided to expand their timeline, says Cabral. Then, a few weeks into the spring semester, the students made their biggest breakthrough yet: They found White’s marriage records. According to the manuscript, White married a woman named Ellen Steward, whose parents lived in Washington, D.C., and their wedding was officiated by a Reverend “S. Grinds.” Records from the Boston marriage registry showed that Thomas White, a 27-year-old waiter from Maryland, wed Ellen Steward, a 20-year-old from Washington, in 1852. The officiant was the Reverend Leonard A. Grimes, a prominent figure in the abolitionist movement.
The manuscript had suggested that Thomas’ last name may have been White; a cousin refers to him as “Mr. White.” But the marriage records offered the researchers their first real confirmation. The records also place his birthdate in 1825—which means that, if he escaped slavery at age 15, it would have been around 1840, rather than 1831. “We all believed that Thomas existed, but we had yet to find anything that anchored him to the historical record,” says Elder. “And this anchored him. Rachel and I said, ‘We found you, Thomas. We found you. You exist.’” White met his wife while he was living in Boston, where he’d found work as a cook at a hotel. Life had become “at times dull,” and he had begun “longing for an introduction to some kind girl.” He soon found one: Ellen, an “amiable and interesting person” he met through friends.
The researchers quickly learned that Ellen’s story was just as compelling as her husband’s. They think she was the daughter of an enslaved woman named Sukey, who worked as a maid for first lady Dolley Madison. After her husband’s presidency, Dolley brought Sukey to Montpelier, the Madison family’s plantation, and then back to Washington in the years after his death. When money grew tight, Dolley sold all of Sukey’s surviving children—except for the youngest, Ellen (whose last name is sometimes spelled as “Stewart”). When Ellen was 15, she found out she was going to be sold, too, and she tried to flee along with more than 70 others aboard the schooner Pearl, in an 1848 incident now known as the largest nonviolent escape attempt by enslaved people in American history. While the attempt was thwarted, abolitionists raised money to purchase freedom for some of the runaways, including Ellen. They found her work in Boston, where she encountered a young man named Thomas White.
On the night they met, “I received great satisfaction from her ingenious and refined conversation,” White recalled. “Before the evening was spent, I declared my passion for her, and the only excuse for so abrupt a disclosure was love at first sight.” After an eight-month courtship, White proposed. The manuscript says he was in his “21st year” at the time of his engagement, though the marriage records list his age as 27.
But before the wedding, a friend who “followed the sea in the capacity of captain’s cook” suggested that White put off marriage for a year. The friend was scheduled to sail to California—which was “in the height of prosperity on account of the gold fields,” per the manuscript—and he offered White a job as the captain’s steward. When Ellen inquired about this conversation, “I did not directly answer her questions,” White recounted. “She said to me, ‘I can partly divine the reason, for I think he wants you to go to California with him. But as you have made an engagement with me, you surely would not think of such a thing.’”
White reasoned that the voyage would provide the couple with money to start their life together. His fiancée conceded but asked that they marry “at once” so that “I shall be sure of your coming back to me again.” He recalled that he “laughed at her fears of losing me but complied with her wishes.” The records list their wedding date as January 25, 1852—right at the height of the California Gold Rush.
According to the manuscript, White shipped out days after the wedding aboard a vessel called the Allo, which was captained by one Henry Remington. The research team found that on January 21, 1852, a notice in the Boston Daily Atlas referenced a ship called the Ala, helmed by Samuel T. Remington, that had been “delayed by the long storm” but would set sail “after a few fair days.”
After a “very sad” parting with his wife, White embraced his itinerant tendencies. He spent six months working in San Francisco as a pastry chef before “wishing to see more of the country.” When historic flooding in Sacramento sent him back on the road, he was offered a job as a cook aboard a ship headed to Callao, Peru, and then New York. White accepted, feeling “rejoiced in my mind that in a few months I should see my wife.” But in the midst of that voyage, the captain told White that they’d need to make a new stop on the way back: Baltimore.
“I told him Baltimore was a slave state and would give a free man trouble to get from there,” White explained. “I did not lead him into the full secret that I made my escape from the same state and that I was afraid to be captured.” The captain assured White that he’d vouch for him if he encountered any trouble leaving the city. In Baltimore, the captain swore before a judge that he’d known White from birth and that he’d always been a free man. The judge sketched White’s face and told them he’d be allowed to depart. But the next day, he was denied passage because the captain wasn’t a citizen of Baltimore. The matter was resolved only when the ship’s first officer, who was a citizen of Baltimore, vouched for him. After that experience, White made up his mind that he would “ever be a stranger” in his birth state.
He stayed with his wife for three months before departing on his next voyage. The rest of the manuscript describes White’s journeys to faraway destinations like Melbourne, Australia, and Kolkata, India, where he worked in a series of odd jobs. “The thing that stands out in this account is that Thomas literally—and ingeniously—worked his way to freedom, performing all kinds of jobs to get the money that would sustain him: cook, lumberjack, butcher, waiter, you name it, whatever he had to do,” says Rediker. “He was savvy, canny and clever in the extreme. He found dozens of ways to fight back against a slave system of monstrous power—and he won.”
The manuscript ends in the middle of White’s travels. The team doesn’t know what happened to him, which is “probably the hardest part for me, as one of the leading researchers, to wrap my head around,” says Cabral. “I so desperately want to know.” In 1910, Ellen began listing herself as “widowed” in the census. “I don’t know if that’s because Thomas actually had passed away or because she was thinking, ‘I’ll probably never see him again. He’s always off at sea. I’m basically a widow,’” Cabral adds. She hopes someone will read this article in Smithsonian magazine and recognize White as one of their ancestors.
Elder is hoping to find out whether Thomas and Ellen White have any surviving descendants. “This story doesn’t belong to me,” she says. “It belongs to them.” The researchers think the couple had at least one child, Gertrude Adele White, who was 5 when she was listed alongside Ellen in the 1860 census. They speculate that her birth could align with White’s visit home after his first voyage. The researchers have found one of Gertrude’s children, Helen Adele Johnson Whiting, but they aren’t sure if any direct descendants are still living.
Many of the manuscript’s mysteries remain unsolved. Who wrote down White’s story? How did the pages end up with Elder’s in-laws? Elder has a few theories, though she caveats that she’s only speculating. Her husband’s great-great-grandfather, James Jenkins, captained ships in the mid-1800s, and he wrote letters in 1865 that mention hiring a new cook who was a Black man from Baltimore. During these voyages, which tended to include a lot of downtime, White might have told the other crew members his story. “It is possible—and again, speculative—that during the doldrums, during the periods of headwinds,” several listeners took turns writing White’s tale down, says Elder.
Elder is in the process of donating the manuscript to the John Hay Library at Brown, where it will be available to researchers. “We see these sources not just as treasures—as things to be protected—but also as tools to teach students and visitors how to conduct primary source analysis and historical inquiry,” says Heather Cole, the library’s head of special collections instruction and its curator of literary and popular culture collections. “It can be used certainly for conversations about enslavement and abolition, but I think also meta-narratives around its creation and survival. So it’s a really great teaching tool.”
The Roger Williams researchers see the manuscript as a timely discovery, emerging at a moment of declining support for the humanities and simmering debates over how to teach—and reckon with—the American legacy of slavery. Cabral thinks White’s story should be part of the conversations about whether we center America’s triumphs, confront its troubled past or find space for both. “To me, there’s nothing more patriotic than a story like Thomas’,” she says. “He is everything that we claim the American spirit to be.”
