There's More to That
A Smithsonian magazine special report
A Stunning Escape From Slavery Told on Tattered Pages
Thomas White’s tale of finding freedom is discovered more than a century after it was documented
In the mid-1800s, before the Civil War, Thomas White fled his enslavement in Maryland for freedom. It was a risky escape, one that involved a horseback ride under the cover of darkness, abolitionists helping to hide him, and a northward journey through Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Ultimately, he arrived—safe and free—in Massachusetts. The details of White’s flight are chronicled on 40-odd sheets of paper and were written most probably by other people who heard his story. Such slave narratives are exceedingly rare, and this one’s length made it especially unique. Smithsonian magazine wrote about the discovery last year.
In this episode, we speak with Rachel Fortuna Cabral, the Roger Williams University undergraduate who helped study the manuscript, and scholar Deborah Plant to learn about White’s escape, how the papers were discovered, and what such narratives tell us about slavery and emancipation in the United States.
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Ari Daniel: There’s a moment from the autumn of 2024 that Rachel Fortuna Cabral remembers acutely.
Rachel Fortuna Cabral: We’re sitting in the history wing, and in front of me is a box.
Daniel: Rachel was on campus at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island where she’s an undergrad majoring in history.
Cabral: And we open up the box, and in it sits the tattered pages of the yellowing manuscript. And I just felt chills go across my body. You see this beautiful cursive. And the pages are big. It’s not like notebook paper. They are big sheets of paper. And I remember touching to turn the page and just being so careful because I was holding history in my hands.
Daniel: Specifically, it appeared to be the history of Thomas White, an African American man who escaped slavery in the mid-1800s and lived to recount the tale. What made these 41 giant, double-sided, handwritten pages even more remarkable is that they’d just been discovered unexpectedly on the screened-in porch of the in-laws of Cindy Elder in Barrington, Rhode Island.
Cabral: It’s not in an archival box. It’s left open to the elements amongst family documents for the Elder family.
Daniel: At the time, Cindy was doing research for a book of historical fiction based on her family’s legacy in the shipping and sailing industries. But when she found this unexpected manuscript in a pile of ship logs, newspaper clippings and other historic documents, she was more than a little confused. What did this narrative have to do with her family?
Cabral: We think that the Elder family had a sailing ship that Thomas was a ship’s cook on, but we’re really not certain.
Daniel: To learn more, Cindy brought the manuscript to Charlotte Carrington-Farmer, a historian of early America at Roger Williams University. Charlotte invited Rachel to help lead an investigation of the manuscript. They wanted to uncover as much as they could about Thomas White and how this document came to be. Smithsonian magazine recently reported on its discovery and significance.
Cabral: I had already read the manuscript and started to familiarize myself with it, but it’s so different from reading the transcribed version on a Google Doc and then seeing and holding the manuscript itself—these tattered pages that have watermarks on them and are ripping away. It was a very emotional experience. And I want to be able to ensure that that feeling that I had gets to Thomas’ descendants. I want them to be able to have that feeling too.
Daniel: From Smithsonian magazine and PRX productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show that views history as a living journey. I’m Ari Daniel. In this episode, we follow the incredible story of a self-emancipated man, and we explore the genre of first-person accounts from formerly enslaved people and what those voices from the past can teach us today. Stay tuned.
Daniel: So you’re holding these pages. They tell a story about a man named Thomas White. Who was Thomas White?
Cabral: He was a remarkable man, genuinely. I mean, when we talk about this manuscript, we talk about it in the context of slave history, but to me, this manuscript goes beyond that. Thomas is not just a man who escaped enslavement. He is determined, not only in his escape from enslavement, but beyond that, when he takes up numerous jobs, starting as a ship’s cook and just traveling the world. When you’re reading the manuscript, you can really feel his personality shine through.
Daniel: What was his childhood like? Where did he grow up?
Cabral: He grew up in Cambridge, Maryland, is what he says in the manuscript, on a plantation. He never mentions a master. He mentions a mistress and he talks about the brutality of slavery. What inspires him to escape is stories that he hears from his mistress’s son. The mistress’s son spends some time at university in Philadelphia, comes back and tells Thomas about the free Black population in Philadelphia and how white people there are not allowed to insult them or treat them as they do in Maryland.
Daniel: So he hears about the possibility of being free farther north and hatches this plan to escape. Do we know much about what he was feeling in the period leading up to his intended escape?
Cabral: He was scared.
Daniel: Yeah.
Cabral: He talks about this moment where before he sets off on his journey, he goes to his mother’s grave, knowing that that is the last time he will be able to visit his mother’s grave. Because once he sets out for freedom, he can’t step back in Maryland, or he will be re-enslaved.
Daniel: What did he say at his mother’s grave? Do we know?
Cabral: So he says, “As I turned to leave the only home I had ever known, 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. I then proceeded to the stables, which were situated about a quarter of a mile from the house. On reaching them, I let out two horses and saddled them and then repaired to a corner of the street where my comrade was awaiting my arrival.”
Daniel: What was that journey like?
Cabral: The journey itself was perilous. He sets out with one of his friends who lives on a neighboring plantation, and his friend doesn’t complete the journey, but Thomas does. With the help of abolitionists, Thomas is able to escape up the northeast. He describes how, to his understanding, there’s spies along the way, too, who tried to catch people who are trying to self-emancipate.
Daniel: So he quickly fell into the hands of abolitionists and the Underground Railroad to help him farther north?
Cabral: Yes. Yep. So to our understanding of it, Thomas starts in Cambridge, makes his way through Maryland, then through Pennsylvania, and then New York, and ends up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he stays for a time working at a Young Ladies Seminary, and then off to Boston where he meets his wife, Ellen.
Daniel: Did he write this?
Cabral: Thomas is illiterate. We know that he did not hand write this manuscript. So our best guess goes back to why this manuscript is in with the rest of the Elder family’s shipping records. And that’s that when Thomas likely worked as a ship’s cook on one of the Elder family’s ships, they would sit around and Thomas would tell his incredible life story, and various people on the ship would write it down. There’s what we think are four distinct handwriting styles within the manuscript.
Daniel: So, going back to the discovery of the manuscript for a moment: Charlotte Carrington-Farmer, who was overseeing the research, and she said she was really taken by the document, but also somewhat nervous, because historians are usually trained to be skeptical about new documents and their origins, particularly ones like this. So what’s your understanding of why historians should be skeptical, and how does that relate to this manuscript?
Cabral: Sure. It’s not every day that a 41-page manuscript detailing the story of a man who escapes enslavement winds up at your doorstep. So I completely understand her pause. Another reason why we had to take a beat there was because there are works of abolitionist propaganda that have been written where it’ll tell a story, and the function of it is to try and further the abolitionist effort. So scholars who we had spoken to had suggested that this might be a work of abolitionist propaganda. Obviously, we hope that that wasn’t the case. We hoped that there was more to this story. And with the finding of what we believe is Thomas’s marriage certificate, that was kind of our big moment where we were able to say, “Thomas, we found you in the archival records.” This is not a piece of abolitionist propaganda. This is real.
I think another thing, too, is the manuscript is so detailed and a lot of it does line up with real places and things that we know happened within history. For example, the Young Ladies Seminary in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that I said Thomas works at for a time, we know that that existed because of research that we’ve done. So it seemed too detailed to just be a piece of abolitionist propaganda.
Daniel: You were coordinating a team of student researchers. What was the goal of your work over the course of the semester?
Cabral: So, one group of students was focused on the paleography and trying to understand how many different types of handwriting there are in the manuscript, and how we can determine that they are definitely different, and it’s not just that the ship was moving differently that day or the writer was tired.
Another group was trying to learn more about Thomas’ time whilst he was enslaved. So, seeing if we could find his name in any records in Cambridge, Maryland, and trying to understand what enslavement in Cambridge looked like during this time period and providing that historical context to the team.
Another group was focused on trying to track descendants, because another major goal of this project is to reunite his descendants with the story of their remarkable ancestor. That group found the marriage certificate and who we believed to be Thomas’ daughter. And we hope that through the Smithsonian article and podcasts like this, maybe this story will ring familiar to someone and they’ll reach out and say, “Hey, this might be my ancestor.”
Daniel: You mentioned the marriage records that you discovered, and so you found out that Thomas married Ellen Steward. Can you tell me who Ellen was?
Cabral: As far as we can tell, Ellen had a pretty remarkable life of her own. We believe that Ellen’s mother was Sukey Steward, who was enslaved to President James Madison and his wife, Dolley Madison. When we found that out, I remember my jaw just dropping, because this manuscript already has such significance, I believe, but this just reaffirmed that. And beyond that, Ellen’s escape from enslavement is pretty remarkable in itself. She attempts to escape enslavement aboard the Pearl, which is the largest nonviolent escape from enslavement in United States history. Unfortunately, not successful in her attempted escape, [she] is captured. But abolitionists in Boston raised money to purchase her freedom, which is what leads her to Boston, where she eventually meets Thomas.
Daniel: After they married, Thomas White traveled extensively for work. Where did he go, and what did he do?
Cabral: He starts out as a captain’s steward on a ship that goes from Boston to California. And then from there, Thomas travels the world. He goes to Calcutta. He goes to Melbourne, Australia.
Daniel: And leaves his wife behind for months on end.
Cabral: Yes. So the only time that is mentioned in the manuscript that Thomas reunites with Ellen is for a short period of three months in New York that they’re together. And why that’s so important is because, to our understanding, that must be when their child was conceived. And it lines up with census records and everything. The years seem to line up well if they were to spend three months in New York together and then their daughter Gertrude was born.
But it gets to a point where his wife, Ellen, starts self-reporting as widowed in the census. And I don’t know if that’s because Thomas has actually passed or because her thought process is, “He’s always away, who knows if I’m ever going to see him again. He might be dead.” That’s another one of our research questions. What happened to Thomas after this manuscript just abruptly ends?
Daniel: What were some of the inconsistencies that you ran into while trying to tie Thomas White to the historical record, and how did you resolve those?
Cabral: So, one of the biggest inconsistencies was time—our timeline, the years we were working in—because Thomas only mentions a year once. When he’s escaping enslavement, he says, “Bidding adieu to the town forever in the 2nd of March 1831. I, being then in my 15th year,” et cetera, et cetera. So he says he’s 15 in March of 1831. And that’s the only date that we’re ever provided.
And in the early phases when we were sending out this document to scholars, we sent it to Dr. Timothy Walker at UMass Dartmouth. He suggested that our timeline was off by ten years based on everything else that was happening in the manuscript and what he knows to be true of history. At this point, we had been hitting a lot of dead ends in archival research. When we extended our timeline these ten years, particularly in terms of the marriage record, that’s when things started turning up. The marriage record actually comes up from 1852, so quite a discrepancy there. So yeah, I would say the biggest issue that we had to resolve was the timeline. And it still is.
Deborah Plant: I think in the case of the discrepancy with the date, I think that’s going to be an open question for historians to ponder. It’s really hard to say, especially because he didn’t write it.
Daniel: This is Deborah Plant, an independent scholar in African American literature and Africana studies, and a literary critic specializing in the life and work of writer Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston was a 20th century author, anthropologist, playwright and member of the Harlem Renaissance. She’s most famous for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But she also compiled oral histories of former enslaved African Americans, including that of Oluale Kossola, who at the time was believed to be the last survivor of the last American slave ship. Hurston’s posthumously published book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, told Kossola’s story.
Plant: When you talk about dates, especially that ten-year span, it reminds me of Hurston, who would write her birthdate ten years later. But she had a reason for changing it. She wanted to go back to school, and it would have been free for those of a certain age, and she was older than that age limit. And so she changed it so that she could go back to school and get her high school diploma. She had a reason for it.
Then we could ask the question, “Did Thomas?” I think when we find discrepancies like that, Ari, that it allows us to ask questions, right? Because one of the things about history is it keeps morphing. And it’s always going to do that because human beings are involved.
Daniel: Deborah, how does having these first-person accounts enrich the historical record?
Plant: With the first-person account, that’s a lens that is unique, because no one else is going to have that particular experience. There’s the experience of enslavement, but each enslaved person experienced it differently. We can identify with the individual. “I experienced this,” and when you read, “I” becomes the reader. In this way, we can develop that empathy. And this, of course, is one of the reasons why Barracoon has been so important, because when it comes to what happened to us on the African continent, where’s the account of the individual who actually experienced it? We have very little of that when it comes to not only what happened on the continent, but also what happened during the Middle Passage.
Daniel: Deborah, you edited Zora Neale Hurston’s oral history of the life of Oluale Kossola, who was one of the last known surviving Africans transported by an American slave ship. I’m wondering if you can talk about the importance of having an account from someone like Hurston, who was a literary giant and an anthropologist?
Plant: She was consummate in her methodology, and she was revolutionary in protecting the integrity of her work. One of the reasons that the work was published only in 2018 was because she refused to change it. Publishers who were interested in the work said that they would publish it if she would, as they put it, write it in language rather than dialect. And if she had changed it, it would have been a work of fiction, not the document that it is today. In maintaining the dialect, what Hurston knew and understood was that language was an authenticating feature of an individual or a group or a society. This is a prominent feature of expression. And so she was very meticulous in how she captured his expression, how she documented it. And so we get a real feel for the human being. It’s not just a story.
Daniel: Given that so many of these stories were transcribed by white writers or abolitionists, like Thomas White’s, what is the significance of having the account of Oluale Kossola from a Black writer, from Hurston?
Plant: The most important thing would be to have a transcriber who is interested in being a conduit or vessel for the person whose story you’re writing down. What comes to mind are the WPA narratives where there were workers who were sent out to collect these stories from the formerly enslaved individuals.
Daniel: You’re referring to the Works Projects Administration in the 1930s.
Plant: Yes. And you can tell from reading the collected narratives that the individuals were basically answering set questions and doing so with an intention not to say too much to the stranger. And many of them, if not most of them, were white individuals. Because that fear of what those who were the perceived authority, what they might do or think, or what they might do with your story, is ever present. With Thomas White, he was very careful who he talked to. So that fear of someone actually knowing really what you think. When they are in a position to punish you or to tell your story to someone else who can and might punish you or take revenge or somehow put you in a negative situation, that was a very real fear. And so it mattered who collected these stories, and how, and with what purpose. Now, if your purpose is to get your story before you die so we can put this in our archives and whatnot, then you have a function that you’re performing and it’s not about portraying the humanity of the individuals that you are talking to.
Hurston was unique in her work. She had the wisdom to open herself up to the subjectivity of her “subject” and allow him to teach her how to get his story. With Hurston, it’s very clear that Kossola had come not only to trust her, but also to love her.
Daniel: We don’t know who listened to Thomas White’s story originally and wrote it down, or whether Thomas trusted them fully. But one thing Deborah Plant can say with certainty is that each account like this that surfaces from someone who was once enslaved adds a piece to the larger puzzle.
Plant: For every Thomas White, there are, like, thousands who never told anyone their story. We don’t know their story. And so just like with Kossola, Thomas White and those other individuals who have, very amazingly, been able to have their stories documented in one way or another, these individuals speak for so many whose names we’ll never know, whose voices we’ll never hear, not their own particular tonality. But in some way it’s encoded in Thomas White’s narrative. He is speaking for all of those who didn’t have someone to write their story down. And he’s speaking for those who died in that institution. It’s like a mythology of the wisdom from what’s called the hero’s journey. You escaped; you made it. But all of the experiences of the hero are for the collective, it’s for humanity as a whole.
And so Thomas White’s narrative is this boon that we get from his heroic journey. And it was heroic. He manages to escape, to fall into the hands of people who are willing to help, and do help. He works hard. He helps others. And so his story, the importance of it is, again, it’s like our history is alive. And so here’s a voice from another dimension, so to speak, that insinuates itself into our now moment and says, “Here I am. Here is what I have for us to understand about ourselves as individuals, as Americans, as human beings.” We have to keep educating one another and cultivate within one another the empathy required to evolve humanity. I think a manuscript like Thomas White’s helps us to do that.
Daniel: Rachel, where does the manuscript end?
Cabral: The manuscript ends in the middle of a voyage for Thomas. The last few pages are completely unreadable and then everything just kind of stops. The pages end. There’s no more there.
Daniel: It seems like it’s captured your imagination, it’s captured your mind, it’s captured your heart.
Cabral: Yeah. I get emotional talking about it a lot of the times. Before I go on to give a presentation, I have to give myself a little pep talk where I’m like, “Okay, get it all out now.” Even just the opening quote of the manuscript, which I’d love to share.
Daniel: Sure.
Cabral: “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.”
And I mean, a lot of times when talking about American culture and American history, we talk about this bootstraps mentality—freeing yourself from the situation you’re in and making the best of it. And this is what Thomas’ story is. I mean, he escapes from bondage and goes out and sets sail across the world.
Daniel: What’s this personal connection? Why do you think you feel so tethered to him?
Cabral: I think the time at which this manuscript came to me is incredibly important when we’ve been having discussions on how to teach history, particularly concerning slave history. Thomas has a voice, and it deserves to be heard.
Daniel: I remember one of the challenges for me of studying history was it never felt alive. It felt distant and random. And something like this, it’s reaching … it’s grabbing you from another moment and bringing you close and saying, “Pay attention.”
Cabral: Yeah. When the manuscript is sitting right in front of you, it doesn’t feel distant at all.
Daniel: To read more about the discovery of the Thomas White manuscript, visit smithsonianmag.com. We’ll put a link in our show notes.
On the next episode of “There’s More to That,” we’ll travel to the Swiss Alps where climate change is threatening glaciers, towns and even the future of winter sports.
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“There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX productions.
From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Ali Budner, Cleo Levin, Genevieve Sponsler, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez.
Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. I’m Ari Daniel. Thanks for listening.
Daniel: Rachel, have you had any dreams about Thomas White, or has he come into your life in other ways besides the manuscript?
Cabral: I’m waiting for Thomas to appear to me in a dream. No, but a fun little fact here—Thomas has his own family tree on my ancestry account.
Daniel: Really?
Cabral: Yep. Ancestry has a great online archival database for things like census records and marriage certificates, etc., etc. So I’ve created a tree with Thomas and Ellen, and then trying to track their descendants. I also have little alerts for any time a document with the name Thomas White between 1840 and 1850 in the United States comes into the database. So yeah, Thomas is basically my family now.
