Patty Cannon - Political and Economic Context

Political and Economic Context

The U.S. Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808. At that point, because of the restriction of supply, the cash value of slaves shot upwards, hitting over $1,000 in the South and creating a strong incentive for kidnappers. Many free blacks lived in Cannon's neighborhood near the Maryland-Delaware border, and were convenient targets for her kidnapping forays. Kidnapping enslaved blacks was riskier, as their white owners would protest; likewise the murder of white slave traders was taken seriously. However, the kidnapping of free blacks left their land and other property behind, and failed to outrage the white community the way the theft of white-owned slaves did, or the murder of whites.

A novel written about Cannon sixty years after she was most active, The Entailed Hat, Or, Patty Cannon's Times of 1884, theorizes that the political and economic situation created by the War of 1812 made Cannon's crimes possible. It also may explain why whites failed to come to the aid of their free black neighbors. The war in this passage is the British–American War of 1812, which lasted until 1815. "Tories" was slang for the British, who tried to recruit slave blacks to their army by promising freedom. The Chesapeake Bay locations referenced are Tangier Island of Virginia, Cambridge, Maryland and Georgetown, Delaware.

In them days they didn’t kidnap much; it was jest a-beginnin’. The war of ’12 busted everything on the bay, burned half a dozen towns, kept the white men layin’ out an’ watchin’, and made loafers of half of ’em, an’ brought bad volunteers an’ militia yer to trifle with the porer gals, an’ some of them strangers stuck yer after the war was done. I don’t know whar ole Ebenezer come from; some says this, an’ some that. All we know is, that he an’ the Hanlen gals, one of ’em Patty Cannon, was the head devils in an’ after the war....

The British begun to run the black people off in the war. The black people wanted to go to ’em. The British filled the islands in Tangier yer with nigger camps; they was a goin’ to take this whole peninsuly, an’ collect an’ drill a nigger army on it to put down Amerikey. When the war was done, the British sailed away from Chesapeake Bay with thousands of them colored folks, an’ then the people yer begun to hate the free niggers....

They hated free niggers as if they was all Tories an’ didn’t love Amerikey. So, seein’ the free niggers hadn’t no friends, these Johnsons an’ Patty Cannon begun to steal ’em, by smoke! There was only a million niggers in the whole country; Louisiana was a-roarin’ for ’em; every nigger was wuth twenty horses or thirty yokes of oxen, or two good farms around yer, an’ these kidnappers made money like smoke, bought the lawyers, went into polytics, an’ got sech a high hand that they tried a murderin’ of the nigger traders from Georgey an’ down thar, comin’ yer full of gold to buy free people. That give ’em a back-set, an’ they hung some of Patty’s band — some at Georgetown, some at Cambridge.

— excerpt from Chapter XXIV of The Entailed Hat by George Alfred Townsend, 1884