The Other Slave Trade.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: BOOKS

Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home

By Richard Bell

Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, on sale October 15.

Most Americans are well aware of the Underground Railroad that helped escaped Southern slaves find freedom in the North, but few have heard of the Reverse Underground Railroad that delivered free Northern black Americans into slavery. That's probably not just because we prefer uplifting stories over shocking and depressing ones. It's also because the latter railroad, which transported about the same number of people as the former--hundreds each year--puts the lie to the notion of the North as a safe haven, making the nation's original sin even harder to forgive.

Stolen, a new book by Richard Bell, tells the remarkable and brutal story of this other railroad, focusing on one horrifying case for which significant documentation exists. It involves the abduction of five African American boys from their families in Philadelphia in 1825.

What happened to these youngsters was not an aberration. During the first half of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of free Northern black people, many of them children, were kidnapped into slavery in Southern states. Plantation owners in Southern states would pay $400 to $700 per newfound slave, then a tidy sum (comparable to $9,000 to $15,000 today).

Bell, who teaches early American history at the University of Maryland, notes that, unlike Harriet Tubman and others who played a role in the Underground Railroad, the conductors and station agents of the Reverse Underground Railroad "never gave public lectures about their work or went on fundraising tours." They left no business records for historians to pick through. Being forgotten by history would be just fine by them.

The most famous story involving the Reverse Underground Railroad is that of Solomon Northup, the subject of the 2013 Oscar-winning film Twelve Years a Slave. Bell notes that many details of Northup's story are atypical, in that he was well-educated and middle-aged; most kidnappers "preferred instead to lure away poorly educated children" with various ruses. In fact, the abduction of black children from Northern cities was so common that parents and communities were on guard against it.

"At home each night before bed and again over breakfast the next morning," Bell writes, "parents pestered their sons and daughters to stay in large groups, to read body language, to steer clear of certain streets...