In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams

"... we were going to West Harbor to hear Negro Bennett preach in 1854 ... Bennett was about sixty years old at the time. I think the largest negro settlement in the county, if not the state, was at West Harbor in the early fifties." [From Jesse Miner, 1937. History and Anecdotes of Washington Island: Duo Van Publishing Company]Washington Island, Wisconsin in the 1850s was about as remote from the slave-holding southern states as it was possible to get in the United States. Before the passage of the second Fugitive Slave Act, which made it legal for bounty hunters to capture any black person they claimed was an escaped slave in the abolitionist states, a number of black families established a fishing community on the island. This is the tale of those slaves who escaped from the boot of Missouri and eventually made it, under the leadership of the charismatic black preacher Tom Bennett, and with the invaluable help of the Underground Railroad, to a new life in freedom and what happened then.