“A New Map of Arkansas with Its Canals, Roads & Distances,” (Philadelphia: H. S. Tanner, 1842). Image: Courtesy David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Stanford University, davidrumsey.com.

Neither the bills of sale nor the deposition reveal how Hackett arrived in Fayetteville or how Jacob Cartwright came to own him, but they do make clear that Hackett was born around 1817 and that the white people of Fayetteville knew him only as “Nelson.” Why, when, and how he took the last name Hackett, which he used to describe himself in Canada, remains unknown.

The little that is known of Hackett’s physical appearance and demeanor comes from accounts of his flight from Fayetteville and legal documents related to his extradition from Canada. A reporter for the Peoria Register and North-Western Gazette, who crossed paths with Hackett on his return to Fayetteville in May 1842, offered the most detailed description of the fugitive and his flight. The journalist described Hackett as “handsomely formed, about 30 years old, of very prepossessing address,” adding that he “wore his hair nicely combed, was genteelly clad, and was in short a negro dandy.” That Hackett signed depositions in Canada with an “X” suggests that he, like most enslaved people, was unable to write.

Alfred Wallace and the abolitionists provide differing accounts of Hackett’s escape from Arkansas. Both parties knew that Canada would not return Hackett for simply escaping slavery and tailored their accounts to emphasize or deemphasize Hackett’s alleged thefts. Wallace, who admitted to leaving Hackett unsupervised for “two or three weeks” at a time, testified that on or about July 17, 1841, Hackett stole several items before fleeing Fayetteville. The thefts included a gold watch from the home of a neighbor, Onesimus Evans, and “one roan Mare, aged ___, branded with figure 2 on her left foreshoulder, and also one blue beaver over-coat, the body and collar of which were lined and faced with black silk velvet, and also a quantity of Mexican Silver, and Gold of the coin of the United States, of the value of 100 £” from the Wallace home. Wallace initially claimed that Hackett had raped a white woman before the thefts and escape, but he ultimately dropped the claim, offering no evidence to the Washington County Grand Jury or Canadian authorities that such a crime occurred. Abolitionists, though, portrayed the thefts as incidental to Hackett’s escape. According to Charles H. Stewart, a white abolitionist who interviewed the fugitive in Detroit, Hackett had accompanied Wallace to a horse race “a considerable distance” from Fayetteville. Wallace did not return home but directed Hackett to take the horse and other items back. Instead of heading to Fayetteville, Hackett made his escape. As Stewart wrote, “Hackett finding himself well mounted, under circumstances that permitted absence, directed his course towards liberty . . . . At the time he had in care the outside coat of his master, and he also had his gold watch.” Both accounts are problematic. Wallace admitted to being out of town at the time of Hackett’s escape, not returning to Fayetteville until July 24, but nonetheless he testified under oath about what happened. Stewart never accounts for why Wallace would be travelling with a fur coat in Arkansas in July.

Wallace Brothers

While little is known about Hackett’s life in Fayetteville, more is known about the lives of Jacob Cartwright and the Wallace brothers, though little of it touches directly on the life of Nelson Hackett or even slaveholding. In the summer of 1840, the very time that ownership of Hackett passed from Cartwright to Willis Wallace to Alfred Wallace, the town was in the final throes of what one participant called the “Fayetteville War.” The Wallace brothers led one faction in the conflict, while minister-turned-lawyer Alfred Arrington and Cherokees associated with the Treaty Party formed the other. Although it certainly built upon longstanding animosity, the Fayetteville War began in June 1839 when Willis Wallace stabbed and killed Nelson Orr, a Cherokee passing through Fayetteville on the Trail of Tears on his way to the Indian Territory. A grand jury, headed by Alfred Wallace and including Cartwright, refused to charge Willis Wallace in Orr’s death. Later that year, after Willis Wallace killed another man on the streets of Fayetteville, Arrington went to the Indian Territory and returned with a force of over thirty armed men determined to bring Willis Wallace to justice. The Wallace brothers assembled a force of their own at their grocery on Fayetteville Square and deployed the town’s cannon to confront Arrington and his allies. Cooler heads ultimately prevailed, and the confrontation ended without more bloodshed, but the town remained tense for several years as low-level violence and fears of Cherokees roiled the population. It remains unknown if Nelson Hackett was among those who took up arms to defend Willis Wallace during the troubles.

It is not clear if Hackett’s sale to the Wallace brothers was related in any way to the Fayetteville War, but the Wallace brothers’ main antagonist, Alfred Arrington, penned the most detailed description of the Wallace brothers: “[Riley Wallace, the youngest] was exceeding cruel without being brave; always ready to fight, but never to fight fairly . . . . Alfred was of a similar character; perhaps he was more intrepid in spirit; but he was less dreaded in that country than either of the others, on account of another strong propensity in his nature, that partially neutralized its excessive destructiveness—he had inordinate acquisitiveness. . . . itchingly avaricious! . . . . [Willis] was wholly a creature of passionate impulses.”

Arrington’s account of the Fayetteville War also provides the only description of any of the Wallace brothers’ interactions with enslaved people. It involves Willis. After murdering a groom at an altar in Georgia, Willis escaped with the help of two enslaved men who were waiting nearby: “with a calm step, he [Willis Wallace] left the room, walked deliberately to the large gate, some hundred paces from the door, mounted his horse, which was there held ready for him, by two of his father’s negroes, who had been waiting his return, with three large double-barrel shot-guns, one of which he took in his hand, cocked both barrels, and they all three rode away at a brisk gallop.” Although Arrington did not witness the episode and exaggerated events to sell books, he understood the Wallace brothers as people who entrusted enslaved men with weapons and depended upon them in a fight.

Personal Record Book, Washington County Courthouse, Fayetteville, AR

Bills of sale for “a certain negro boy named Nelson about twenty four years of age” at the Washington County courthouse.

“A New Map of Missouri with Its Roads & Distances,” (Philadelphia: H. S. Tanner, 1842). Image: Courtesy David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Stanford University, davidrumsey.com.

He would have then turned northeast, going overland across a thinly populated section of the state to Marion City. At about 360 miles, Hackett’s journey through areas where slavery was legal ranks it among the longest such overland escapes. Most overland flights were from areas closer to the free states of the North, while longer journeys usually involved ocean or river travel.

The Palmyra, Missouri, jail held George Thompson, Alanson Work, and James Burr after they were arrested for trying to help fugitives cross the Mississippi River near Marion City shortly before Nelson Hackett made his way through the area. Image: George Thompson, Prison Life and Reflections; or, a Narrative of the Arrest, Trial, Conviction, Imprisonment, Treatment, Observation, Reflections, Deliverance of Work, Burr, and Thompson (1850).

A brother [James Burr] from the [Mission] institute having been in Missouri, saw some slaves who longed for freedom, and agreed to help them across the Mississippi river. On the twelfth of July, in company with him and another brother [George Thompson], I started for the place appointed. James and I walked four or five miles back into the country. The first human being that we saw was a woman and her son hoeing tobacco. James spoke to her, and walked on. He found that she wanted to be free and agreed to help her. We next came to a house. James went in and learned from a slave, the whites being absent, that the slaves he had seen before were in the field alone. We went to them, it being now sunset. We asked them if they were going; they told us they were, and that one living a mile from them, where they had some clothes to get, was going with them, and that they would come three hours after dark. We were seen by white men while with the slaves. After dark we came and waited, anxiously listening for the signal. After some time we heard a distant whistle, and by answering repeatedly soon came to five slaves, three fourths or four fifths of a mile from the river, on a bottom prairie. After salutations and professions, we started in a foot path for the river, rejoicing in the prospect of helping the oppressed to liberty and happiness.

Although none of the extensive documentation of the arrest and imprisonment of Thompson, Burr, and Work explicitly mention Hackett, Work’s jail diary celebrated the escape of many fugitives at the time Hackett would have been in the area. On July 26, 1841, for instance, Work wrote: “we overheard a conversation, by which we learned that six slaves had crossed the Mississippi the night before, and that some persons appeared preparing to go to the river to intercept other fugitives.” It could very well be that Hackett was among the six who had crossed on July 25 or the others trying to do so on the next day.

Just as Hackett knew to flee to Marion City, his pursuers recognized that it was the place he would most likely try to cross the Mississippi. Alfred Wallace had dispatched George Grigg to track Hackett and bring him back to Fayetteville in order “to show his fellow slaves that there was no security for them in Canada.” Grigg, though, could not follow the fugitive’s trail across Missouri, but he picked it up in Marion City. In the words of the Peoria Register, “No trace of him [Hackett] could be found until the officers got to Marion City.”

Nelson Hackett passed through Marion City (far left) and ended up in Chatham (upper right), but his route across the region is unknown. “Traveler’s Map of Illinois, Michigan, Indiana & Ohio,” (New York: Phelps, Humphrey, 1843). Image: Courtesy New York Public Library Digital Collections.

It is probable that Hackett travelled via the Underground Railroad, the network of routes, safe houses, and guides that helped fugitives make their way to freedom in Canada. Quincy, Illinois, just north of Marion City, was a well-known starting point on the Underground Railroad. Just the year after Hackett’s flight, Illinois authorities arrested Quincy abolitionist Richard Eells for helping a Missouri fugitive who swam across the Mississippi River. It is possible that Hackett visited Eells house, just four blocks from the river, before being shepherded to other safe houses on the roads to Canada.

Historian Wilbur Siebert mapped underground railroads routes in his The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898).

“Canada West,” (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1845). Image: Courtesy David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Stanford University, davidrumsey.com.

Chatham in 1843 declared, “The colored people can scarcely walk the streets in many parts of Canada without being assaulted and abused by those having a fairer skin.” It is thus hardly surprising that local authorities treated new arrivals like Hackett with deep suspicion, ready to believe the worst and eager to prevent them from putting down roots.

Hackett’s stay in Chatham was short. On September 6, 1841, Alfred Wallace discovered Hackett’s whereabouts and had a local deputy sheriff arrest him on charges of stealing the horse, saddle, gold watch, beaver coat, and gold and silver coin. Wallace’s case was bolstered when he and the deputy found the horse, saddle, watch, and coat in Hackett’s possession. The next day, while still in Chatham, Hackett appeared before two justices of the peace and allegedly confessed to the theft of all but the coin. The justices ordered Hackett to be held at the district jail in Sandwich, just across the river from Detroit, until he could be returned to Arkansas. Hackett, though, later disputed the confession, stating that the beating he received during his arrest—“over the head with the butt of a whip, and a large stick”—had rendered him incoherent when he had testified. In the later testimony, Hackett also noted that Wallace had initially “charged him with having committed a Rape” in order to arouse the indignation of Chatham’s white community. After leaving Chatham, Wallace never mentioned the alleged rape.

Nelson Hackett spent several months in Sandwich, across the river from Detroit. Frederick Grain, “City of Detroit Taken from Canada Shore Near the Ferry,” (1837). Image Courtesy, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

untrustworthy. The petition concluded that, if Hackett were returned to Arkansas, he would “be tortured in a manner that to hang him at once would be mercy,” a punishment far too harsh for the alleged crime. Hiram Wilson, an American evangelical ministering to the fugitive community in the Toronto area, later insisted that if Thomson had lived long enough to consider the fugitive’s plea that Hackett would have most certainly been emancipated.

On the same day that Hackett petitioned to be released, September 18, 1841, Alfred Wallace began the formal extradition process by convincing the acting governor of Michigan to request that the Province of Canada return Hackett to the United States. The next day, September 19, Governor General Thomson died, creating a situation in which no one had the authority or the willingness to act. The province’s attorney general bought some time by recommending that the acting governor general reject the Michigan application, insisting that any extradition request would need to come from either the United States government or Arkansas’s governor and be based on formal charges made by a grand jury. This prompted Wallace to return to Arkansas to secure the necessary documents. There Wallace got what he needed, indictments of Hackett on charges of “Grand Larceny” from a Washington County grand jury and a formal request for extradition from Arkansas governor Archibald Yell.

The acting governor general then asked the Province of Canada’s Executive Council—a cabinet that advised the governor general—to weigh in on the matter. An Executive Council committee reviewed the petitions and depositions and recommended to the incoming governor general, Charles Bagot, that Hackett be sent back to Arkansas. The Executive Council followed the precedent set in 1829 that a fugitive could only be returned for an offense that would have made him liable to arrest in Canada—being a fugitive from slavery was not a crime in Canada but theft was. The Executive Council concluded that there was sufficient evidence to charge Hackett “had the offence wherewith he is charged been committed in this Province” and that he should be sent back to Arkansas “to be dealt with according to the law.”

Newly-arrived Governor General Charles Bagot agreed with the Executive Council that Hackett should be returned to Arkansas. Bagot, though, seemed to ignore the earlier precedent and the Executive Council’s reasoning, writing: “There was no doubt of the guilt of this individual, the stolen property having been found on him on his arrival in the province; nor could it be said that this property had been taken solely to assist him in escaping from slavery, and not with a felonious intent. I felt therefore that to refuse to surrender him would be to establish as a principle that no slave escaping to this province should be given up, whatever offence, short perhaps of murder, he might have committed; a principle which would have been repugnant to the common sense of justice of the civilised world, would have involved us in disputes of the most inconvenient nature with the neighbouring states, and would have converted this province into an asylum for the worst characters, provided only they had been slaves before arriving here.” Although Bagot showed more animosity toward Hackett than did the Executive Committee and seemed more interested in domestic tranquility than the moral implications of chattel slavery, he also suggested a higher standard for future extraditions. Whereas the Executive Council thought fugitives should be returned if the alleged crime was a crime in Canada and there was sufficient evidence to file charges, Bagot justified the extradition based on actual guilt, albeit without a trial or a formal investigation. On January 20, 1842, Bagot ordered Hackett to be surrendered to an Arkansas official or authorized agent.

Bagot’s order caught Hackett and those who had been monitoring his situation by surprise. Leaders in the black community in nearby Detroit had visited Sandwich to speak with Hackett and investigate his legal status, and they departed convinced that he would eventually be emancipated. As they later reported, “A portion of our committee made it their business to attend that Court, and there learned from the presiding Judge that Nelson Hackett had been arrested on a charge of felony, and would remain in jail a certified time, and if sufficient proof should be brought within that time, the case would go before the Governor, and as there was no treaty stipulation (then) binding the two governments to agree up fugitives, and as Nelson Hackett was a slave, it was his decided opinion that he would not be given up.” Likewise Hiram Wilson visited Hackett at Sandwich and noted that he was being treated with “unusual leniency” and given the run of the yard. Hackett, according to Wilson, never contemplated an escape, believing that Canadian authorities would release him rather than return him to Arkansas.

The Detroit jail, where Nelson Hackett awaited his forced return to Arkansas, was also the site of 1833’s Thornton Blackburn riot. Image: Courtesy Toronto Ward Museum.

The fugitive—Thornton Blackburn—found refuge in Canada, but the episode and its aftermath intensified white hostility towards Detroit’s black population and prompted black leaders to counsel a more conservative approach to issues concerning slavery, emancipation, and fugitives.

On the evening of February 14, 1842—less than a week after Hackett was moved back the United States—the leaders of Detroit’s small free black community of about 200 people (in a city of just under 10,000) met at the Second Baptist Church to consider a response. The leaders, who soon organized themselves as the Colored Vigilant Committee, included William Monroe (sometimes spelled Munro), Robert Banks, and Henry Bibb. The black leaders acted cautiously, worrying that action might cast the black community in a negative light. They asked Charles Henry Stewart, a white attorney who had been one of the founding officers of the Detroit Anti-Slavery Society, to investigate Hackett’s extradition to see if there were any legal avenues that might secure his release. Stewart then obtained a writ from the Michigan Supreme Court that allowed him to speak with Hackett and examine the documents pertaining to Hackett’s case. Stewart and the black leaders concluded, in the words of the Colored Vigilant Committee, that the legal papers had been “correctly made out,” the extradition “had been legally done,” and that Hackett “was a felon.” They worried that associating with such a man would “bring a reproach upon the cause of emancipation” and initially declined to mobilize the community to help Hackett.

The Colored Vigilant Committee reconsidered, though. It later explained:

But the committee feeling themselves duty bound to act in [Hackett’s] behalf called a general meeting of our people and resolved to publish the whole affair to the world.

The general meeting convened on February 22, 1842, and issued a detail resolution criticizing Canada’s surrender of Hackett.

The Colored Vigilant Committee considered Hackett’s extradition as threatening Canada’s status as a haven for fugitives and undermining the British Empire’s commitment to the abolitionist cause. The committee explained that “Hacket was not demanded by the Executive of Arkansas, for the purpose of punishing for larceny, but to punish and make an example of him for the unpardonable offense of absconding from slavery.” If slaveholders could use charges of theft as pretexts for securing the return of fugitives, Canada would become like the free states of the North and “no longer be a safe asylum for our unfortunate brethren who are fleeing from bondage.” The Colored Vigilant Committee ordered that copies of the resolution be sent to abolitionist papers in an effort to make Hackett’s case known to the world.

Hackett remained in the Detroit jail until spring, waiting to be taken back to Arkansas. Davenport planned to travel mostly over water—Great Lakes ship to Chicago, stage to Peoria, steamboat down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers to St. Louis, and then onward to Fayetteville. Such a journey had to wait until late spring when the ice cleared on the northern Great Lakes. Hackett, Davenport, and Onesimus Evans, who had recently arrived from Fayetteville to help transport the prisoner, departed on a Great Lakes steamship around May 1, 1842.

Although the type of hobble used to constrain Nelson Hackett remains unknown, this drawing from 1839 shows the sort of chains often used. Image: Cover of American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840 (1839).

Arriving in Chicago on May 8 or 9, 1842, Hackett, his captors, and the four New Yorkers—boarded Winters’ Stagecoach for the four day/three night trip to Peoria, a distance of about 150 miles. Evans and Davenport continued to force Hackett to wear the hobble, no doubt to prevent escape. The trip was uneventful until the third night—probably May 12—when the stage stopped in the town of Princeton, about 55 miles north of Peoria.

​In Princeton on the night of May 12, 1842, or thereabouts, Nelson Hackett escaped and remained at large for two nights before he was recaptured. Like Marion City and Quincy, Princeton was a center of Underground Railroad activity, much of it revolving around the white abolitionist Owen Lovejoy who had moved to the town in 1838. Lovejoy, while serving in Congress in the late 1850s, boasted of his longstanding efforts to assist those fleeing slavery on their way through Princeton: “Owen Lovejoy…aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Proclaim it then from the housetops. Write it on every leaf that trembles in the forest, make it blaze from the sun at high noon…I bid you defiance in the name of my God!” Hackett’s captors, perhaps aware of the town’s reputation, isolated him from the townspeople. The account in the Peoria Register noted, “Care was taken to keep Nelson as secluded from observation as possible, and he had no converse with a single person in Princeton.”

It is not clear if Hackett knew of Princeton’s reputation, sensed his captors’ anxiety, or just felt that the town just afforded him the last best chance of freedom, but that night he escaped. Before the seven men went to sleep in a second story room of a tavern, Hackett’s captors made sure that the windows and doors were secured, but one of the men woke at about 3:00 am to discover that Hackett had freed himself from his hobble and fled through a window. The Peoria Register explained, “The jump from the window was by no means perilous, it being but 10 to 12 feet to the ground, but everything else connected with his escape is a mystery.” The paper speculated that Hackett might have somehow been aided by one of the New York travelers but admitted that there was no evidence that that had happened.

After Nelson Hackett escaped on his return trip to Fayetteville, he was unable to connect with the Underground Railroad in Princeton, Illinois, which operated out of Owen Lovejoy’s home. Image: 1905 postcard of the Lovejoy homestead.

Nelson Hackett spent a few days in the St. Louis jail on this return to Fayetteville. J. C. Wild, “View of St. Louis Taken from Illinois,” (1839). Image Courtesy, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Photo courtesy: Wiki Commons

The most detailed account of Nelson Hackett’s June 1842 return to Fayetteville appeared nine years later in the June 6, 1851 edition of the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery abolitionist newspaper. It came from William Murdock, another enslaved man from Fayetteville who was owned by Alfred Wallace, after he escaped and made his way to Canada in the early 1850s. There Murdock recounted to abolitionist Hiram Wilson what happened to Hackett: “William informs me that Nelson Hackett was brought back by [Alfred] Wallace, his master, who had four hundred and fifty slaves on his plantation—that he was kept in handcuffs and fetters for some time, and closely watched besides—that he was flogged with great severity five or six times, and then sold off to the interior of Texas—that the first whipping, which was done in the presence of all the slaves, consisted of 150 lashes upon his naked body. His whippings afterward varied from 39 to 50 to 60.” Wallace certainly did not hold 450 people in bondage, but Wilson most likely confused the number of enslaved people owned by Wallace with the entire population of the Fayetteville community. The rest of the account, though, is consistent with information that an Arkansas official—probably one of the state’s U.S. senators—supplied to abolitionists Arthur and Lewis Tappan in late 1842: “N. H. was taken to Arkansas—tried for stealing & publickly whipped—then delivered to his master by whom was sold to some one in Texas.”

Lewis Tappan to Edward Cross, December 2? [illegible], 1842, Edward Cross Papers, South Texas Archives, James C. Jernigan Library, Texas A&M University-Kingsville.