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John Bolding never saw them coming. The 27-year-old Poughkeepsie tailor was at work one Monday in August 1851 when a carriage pulled up, its curtains drawn tight around the windows. A few men jumped out, grabbed Bolding, and hustled him into the carriage, which raced to catch the two o’clock to Manhattan. As the train lumbered south along the tracks laid down beside the Hudson River only months earlier, Bolding likely feared he would never see his home again.
This was no ordinary kidnapping. According to a judge who later ruled on the case, it was perfectly within the bounds of the law—the Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850, strengthened the ability of Southern enslavers to track down and capture runaways from bondage even if they crossed into states like New York that had outlawed slavery long ago.
After fleeing a South Carolina plantation a few years earlier, Bolding had made a home in Poughkeepsie and married a local woman. But his new life of freedom proved to be an illusion. A white Southern woman from Charleston recognized Bolding while staying in Poughkeepsie and sent word to his former master, who then engaged the federal marshals that seized Bolding from his shop.
The Hudson Valley was a major route of the Underground Railroad. Runaways from Southern slavery ventured north through New York to Canada, where the slavecatchers couldn’t reach them. But many escapees decided to remain in the region and do their best to blend in. Thriving Black communities could be found from Peekskill to Newburgh to Saratoga. But it was difficult to build a life in the shadows. Fearing re-enslavement, one fugitive from slavery, Merritt Green of Fishkill, tried to take his own life, declaring that “he was a free man, and that he had rather die than be enslaved,” according to Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley by Michael E. Groth.
Despite the best efforts of local anti-slavery activists and lawyers, Bolding’s attempt to fight his abduction failed. The 1850 law heavily favored the enslavers, and the judge ordered him back into slavery. But the South Carolina master decided he had had enough—keeping Bolding enslaved would be more trouble than it was worth. He agreed to sell Bolding to a group of citizens in Poughkeepsie and throughout the Hudson Valley, many of them members of the Dutchess County Anti-Slavery Society, who pooled together funds to buy the captive’s freedom. Some gave only a few pennies, while one person gave $50—more than $2,000 today.
Less than a month after his abduction off the streets of Poughkeepsie, Bolding was back in town. He lived there in a home on Pine Street (since demolished) until he died of tuberculosis in 1876. The tailoring shop where Bolding worked and from which he was abducted was on (aptly named) Liberty Street, now a narrow pedestrian path off Poughkeepsie’s Main Street. In 1998, the Dutchess County Historical Society placed a bronze memorial plaque over Bolding’s previously unmarked grave in the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery.
Related: The Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project Honors Catskills History
