Adam Crosswhite

Adam Crosswhite (1799–1878) was a former slave who fled slavery along the Underground Railroad and settled in Marshall, Michigan. In 1847, slavers from Kentucky came to Michigan to kidnap African Americans and return them to slavery in Kentucky. Citizens of the town surrounded the Crosswhites' house and prevented them from being abducted. The Crosswhites fled to Canada, and their former owner, Francis Giltner, filed a suit, Giltner vs. Gorham et al., against residents of Marshall. Giltner won the case and was compensated for the loss of the Crosswhite family. After the Civil War, Crosswhite returned to Marshall, where he lived the rest of his life.

Slavery Adam Crosswhite was born into slavery on October 17, 1799, in Bourbon County, Kentucky. His mother was an enslaved woman, and his father was his first owner. His father gave him to his paternal aunt, Miss Crosswhite when he was a boy. His aunt married Ned Stone, a slave dealer, who later sold him for $200 to a man with the Troutman surname. When he was 20, Crosswhite was traded to Francis Giltner of Carroll County, Kentucky. Two years later, he married a woman named Sarah. Crosswhite fathered seven children by 1844. When he learned that Giltner intended to sell his eldest child,

Flight They traveled by skiff to Madison, Indiana, where they were met by conductors on the Underground Railroad. Traveling further north to Newport, Indiana, they were taken in and hidden by Quakers for several days because slave catchers were closing in on them. A local man portrayed himself as a slave hunter and offered to guide the Kentuckians to the hiding place of the Crosswhite family. He led them into a dense swamp and made an excuse to leave them. The slave catchers were lost in the woods all night. The family split up, with Sarah and two of their younger children traveling together and Crosswhite pushing on to southern Michigan. They met up five weeks later and settled in Marshall, Michigan, where there was an African-American community of about 50 people, most of whom fled Kentucky to escape slavery.

Giltner hired Francis Troutman as his agent to locate the Crosswhites, who with the help of a spy from Kalamazoo, or more than 150 people.

Later years The Crosswhite family returned to Marshall after the end of the Civil War. and the Crosswhites are interred at the Oakridge Cemetery in Marshall.

Legacy The Crosswhite affair received national attention, and pro-slavery factions called for a stricter fugitive law, which led to the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. As a result, there was a sterner gulf between the anti-slavery and pro-slavery movements. George M. Fuller wrote of the significance of the act, "perhaps as much as the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, aroused the North to resistance, brought together the anti-slavery Democrats, Whigs, Free-Soilers, into a new party, the Republican party, and that initiated the train of circumstances which led to the triumph of that party in 1860 and the preservation of the Union after four years of war."

Popular culture — Juvenile literature about the Crosswhite family The Adam Crosswhite affair is documented at the Buxton National Historic Site and Museum in Ontario, Canada.