Highlights Archives
Honor Black History Month with a New Book
On July 4, 1842, 16-year-old Caroline Quarlls left family, friends, and the only life she'd known behind in St. Louis, Missouri. As the child of a slave mother and a slave-owner father, her young life was one of drudgery and obedience until that fateful Independence Day when she illegally took a steamboat across the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, in the hope of reaching freedom. Quarlls' journey to freedom is the subject of the new book, Caroline Quarlls and the Underground Railroad, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
 The cover of Caroline Quarlls
and the Underground RailroadThis book, part of the Badger Biographies series for young readers, takes you inside the little-known and tension-filled journey of a runaway slave. Traveling north to freedom, Quarlls reached Milwaukee around the same time as slave-hunters paid to retrieve her. Crouching in a hogshead barrel near the corner of Grand Avenue and Kilbourn, Quarlls hid for hours as angry Missourians determined to capture their human prize turned the community upside down.
Milwaukee abolitionist Samuel Brown came to Quarlls' aid, giving her a ride in his wagon to the tiny town of Lisbon, near Waukesha, where Quarlls would meet the first of several Wisconsinites committed to helping slaves find freedom in Canada. Lyman Goodnow, a farmer near Waukesha, reported that Quarlls was the first passenger on the Underground Railroad. Goodnow himself delivered her by boat across the Detroit River to Sandwich, Ontario, the first of many blacks he would help lead to freedom. Another slave, Joshua Glover, also escaped to freedom through Wisconsin, an escape that led to Wisconsin's nullification of the federal Fugitive Slave Act.
The story of Caroline Quarlls is filled with danger and heroism. The bravery and ingenuity of ordinary men and women who dared to offer shelter and help to a resourceful young black girl all alone in a strange land will fascinate young readers unfamiliar with Wisconsin's staunch anti-slavery movement.
Learn more about abolition in Wisconsin:
:: Posted February 5, 2008
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