Priscilla Stack (b. 1824
- d. ?)
MSA SC 5496-051292
Accomplice to slave flight, Dorchester County, Maryland
Biography:
Priscilla Stack was a young wife and mother in Dorchester County when she purportedly assisted in the flight of a family slave.1 Likely in the late 1840's or early 1850's, her husband Peter Stack had negotiated the sale of a "rather comely" female slave named Mintie Patterson. According to Patterson's obituary in the Denton Journal, he had received a good price from a southern trader.2 Being sold further South was a distinct for concern for Maryland slaves during this time, as demand for labor was increasing in the notoriously harsh cotton plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana.
The newspaper account asserts
that Priscilla opposed
the sale and "aided her in secreting herself from the purchaser."3
Mintie
indeed fled soon after hearing the news, and managed to elude capture
despite
never leaving the immediate area. Peter Stack was forced to void the
sale,
and ended up selling the runaway's rights to a local farmer named Daniel
Cannon. Upon his death, Cannon's children were reported to
have allowed
Mintie to buy her freedom for only five dollars.4
That ultimate achievement
might not have been possible had Priscilla Stack not bravely defied her
husband and violated the social conventions of the day. Numerous
Eastern
Shore individuals, white and black, were given years in the state
penitentiary
for the crime of enticing slaves to escape. If the obituary is
accurate,
Priscilla and Mintie were the primary agents in the her escape. This
was
a worthy risk considering that Mintie was able to remain in Maryland,
albeit
as a slave, and avoid the ominous possibility of servitude in the lower
South.
Footnotes -
1. Ancestry.com, 1850, United States Federal Census, Dorchester County, Maryland, District 1, p. 3.
2. "Dashes
Here and There",
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
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