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FeedUnwavering Empathy
Slavery was an abstraction to Thomas Garrett—until it grabbed someone he knew.
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Familiarity does not breed contempt; it breeds empathy. People who know Muslims don’t fear Muslims. Support for same-sex marriage is greater among those who know someone gay.
Familiarity also explains the abolitionist career of Thomas Garrett, who returned to his parents’ Upper Darby home one day in 1813 and found the place in an uproar. An African-American employee referred to in some accounts as “Mary” had been seized, thrown into a wagon and taken away by men who insisted that she was a runaway slave.
Accounts of Mary’s household duties are vague. However, Garrett’s parents had 13 children, so they certainly needed a lot of help. Mary was likely someone who washed Thomas Garrett’s clothes, cleaned the house, and cooked and served his meals.
That connection likely explains his outrage. Garrett followed the wagon by its distinctive track, found the woman and her captors in Kensington, and brought Mary home. Then he devoted the rest of his life to liberating as many slaves as possible. A few years later, he moved to Wilmington, where he became one of the most prominent figures in the Underground Railroad. Garrett claimed to have helped more than 2,700 slaves escape over a 40-year career.
“What he promised, he fulfilled,” wrote abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison on the occasion of Garrett’s death. “What he attempted, he seldom or never failed to accomplish; what he believed, he dared to proclaim upon the housetop; what he ardently desired—and incessantly longed for—was the reign of universal peace and righteousness.”
The Garretts were a prolific Quaker family whose founder, a miller named William Garat, had arrived in Pennsylvania from Leicestershire in 1684. By the time Thomas Garrett was born just over a century later, four generations had passed with eight to 10 children each. As a result, Garretts were spread across most of Delaware and Chester counties.
Thomas Garrett Sr., a farmer and manufacturer of edge tools (scythes, axes, knives, chisels, etc.), had inherited the 284-acre Riverview Farm, a remnant of the original 500-acre estate that included William Garat’s 17th-century farmhouse. And it was there that Thomas, the sixth of 11 children born to his father’s second wife, Sarah Price Garrett, was raised. (Demolished in 1969, the site of the farmhouse on Shadeland Avenue is now a playground for the School of the Holy Child Jesus.)
During Garrett’s boyhood, slavery was not yet the sectional flashpoint issue that it would later become. Indeed, the institution seemed to be dying, as many of the Founding Fathers had hoped it would. Stiff competition against American rice, indigo and tobacco growers made slavery steadily less profitable. (Quakers, of course, had been forbidden by their church to own slaves since 1776.)
But in 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. The device greatly accelerated the processing of raw cotton, allowing producers to cut prices and expand markets. In 1792, the year before Whitney’s invention, the United States exported a mere 138,328 pounds of cotton. “This put her on the same level as a producer as Guiana,” wrote historian Hugh Thomas. In 1820, cotton exports reached 35 million pounds. Gradually, cotton became the South’s major cash crop.
Greater production required more slaves. In 1790, there were only 500,000 slaves in the United States. Between 1800 and 1810, the number increased by a third; between 1810 and 1820, by another third. Cotton became the most important U.S. export, causing an unprecedented demand for slaves. As that demand accelerated, slave populations in the Upper South actually declined somewhat as workers were traded to the Deep South, where cotton was grown. Female slaves were particularly desired, wrote Thomas, because “it was supposed that the sensitive harvesting of cotton demanded female labor.”
Reader Comments:
It is said that the chase Thomas gave the long gone slave wagon was dramatic-following the unique tread marks in the dirt roads first down to South Philadelphia by the orginal Navy Yard at Federal Street and then up to Kensington.
The Garrett Family is supposed to be like the Sellers Family they orginally abuted all the way to the eastern end of Upper Darby, multi generational Abolitionists, quiet yet prolific in their stealthy work. Though records were not kept and early quakers generally worked amongst theirselves limiting outside knowledge there should be no doubt these founding families worked very closely at smuggling runaways from one section to the other.
Thomas would of grown up surrounded by the clandestine work but like many young people somewhat indifferent to some of his parents interests till this episode ignited the great hearth of his life's mission beyond all before him