Western Pennsylvania has a long strange and surprising history with the peculiar institution of slavery. The issue is illuminated at the Senator John Heinz History Center in a new exhibit Free at Last Slavery in Pittsburgh in the th and th Centuries. The exhibit began with this discovery of an oddly marked file found by staff in the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds office of Valerie McDonald Roberts. story continues below They discovered a folder with the word Negro on it says Vice Chancellor Robert Hill of the University of Pittsburgh. They brought it to Valerie s attention and she discovered that it was a transaction related to children. After digging a little more they found that there were records related to slavery. She turned them over to the history center for preservation. Hill heard about the papers and decided to check them out. They re written in this flowery old penmanship so I got a magnifying glass and went through them Hill says. There were famous names asso! ciated with the transactions names that are on towns and villages and streets in Western Pennsylvania. What are these people doing involved with slavery related activities Isaac Craig owned eight slaves and so on. I said Isaac Craig I work on Craig Street. But I wasn t sure there was a connection. So I started learning about him and Gen. John Neville and others and decided that in addition to putting the papers on display we needed to tell the fuller story of slavery in Pittsburgh. With help from Laurence A. Glasco a professor at Pitt who wrote The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh Hill assembled the exhibit. The papers are the centerpiece but Hill was determined to flesh out the story from a visual re creation of the Middle Passage aboard the slave ships to the stories of Pittsburgh s strong abolitionist communities of whites and free blacks. Hill found that Pittsburgh s awkward extended transition from slavery is largely a product of Pennsylvania s Act for the Gradua! l Abolition of Slavery passed in . Even the Quakers in Pennsylvania originally owned slaves but were among the first to turn against the practice. At the time this was a pioneering act of abolition. But it had a lot of loopholes. After March children born of slave women couldn t be slaves for life Hill says. They would serve a kind of term slavery until age . It was because when the legislation was taking shape just like today the lobbyists were out in force. So the slave lobby said You know these slave kids are a nuisance. They have to be fed clothed baby sat and you can t get any real value out them until they re about . So if you re going to abolish slavery we have to be compensated for the investment we ve put into these children. Sometimes slave owners would escape the law by sending pregnant slaves to the South for the births. And there were always slave catchers active in Pennsylvania looking to take escaped slaves back to their owners. Many free blacks applied for Certificates of Freedom to prove their status. We also wanted to show em! powerment Hill says. This is not purely a woe is me story. We did look for the empowering activities particularly of blacks. Pittsburgh had a large population of free blacks some quite wealthy and influential many of whom were involved in the abolition movement. For these stories Hill drew on a series done by Frank Bolden of the Pittsburgh Courier on some of Pittsburgh s founding black families. The first African American doctor to graduate from an American medical college was David Peck the son of John Peck who was a pretty rich free black in Pittsburgh Hill says. John Vashon had baths back when bathhouses had an honorable pedigree. His son was the the first black graduate of Oberlin College and he graduated valedictorian. He became an abolitionist. These were very rich stories related to Pittsburgh and related to slavery but showed empowerment. One section of the exhibit focuses on slave escapes from the great orator Frederick Douglass to an unknown year old girl who esca! ped her Arkansas slaveholders when they stayed at the Monongahela House Downtown. At the time it was Pittsburgh s most elegant hotel and staffed by a large number of abolition minded free blacks who helped the girl disappear. The exhibit includes advertisements for slaves in the Pittsburgh Gazette. But the paper eventually dropped the ads and then turned strongly against slavery. Anti slavery also was one of the major planks of the new Republican Party s platform which chose Pittsburgh for its first national convention in . For these and other reasons Hill thinks Free at Last has a much broader appeal than it might appear to at first glance. This is not just African American history. This is Pittsburgh history and Pennsylvania history and American history Hill says. When you talk about the Republican Party being formed out of the sentiments against slavery . when you talk about the party being established here and ultimately electing a president that plays the leading role in ending slavery that s huge. And it s much broader than just Well her! e s another Black History story. This is an American story. Michael Machosky can be reached at mmachoskytribweb.com or . Back to headlines Related Articles Free at Last slavery exhibition opens at history center Free at Last Slavery in Pittsburgh in the th and th Centuries When a.m. p.m. daily through April . Admission . for senior citizens . for ages . 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