Lenawee County

In 1845, 23,000 residents made Lenawee the fourth largest county in Michigan. As early as 1832, women activists formed the Logan Female Anti-slavery Society. By 1834, Raisin anti-slavery activists Elizabeth and Thomas Chandler, Chandler's father Daniel Smith and Laura and Charles Haviland withdrew from the Quaker church because parishioners there refused a more active and immediate role in ending slavery. Four years later, 56 Raisin residents were members of the Raisin Anti-Slavery Society. In 1839, the Haviland's brother opened the Raisin Institute, the first school in Michigan to integrate students by race and gender. In 1846, Prior Foster a legally free African American from Ohio opened the Woodstock Manual Institute, the first school in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and part of Minnesota to be operated by African Americans.

Throughout slavery, Laura Haviland remained active in efforts to end the enslavement of African Americans. In her autobiography, Haviland reports numerous events where she assisted African Americans and other European Americans as they helped African Americans who escaped slavery and tried to avoid being recaptured. In 1846, Willis and Elsie Hamilton returned to Raisin to rent land from Haviland. Having escaped slavery in Tennessee from a man named John P. Chester about ten years before, the Hamilton's lived in Indiana, Raisin, Ypsilanti and Monroe, never feeling completely safe from those who would return them to slavery. In 1846, the Hamilton's asked a friend to write to John Bayliss to ask about the two children they had to leave behind when they escaped. Bayliss had once enslaved Willis, but experienced a change of heart when a woman he enslaved asked how he lived with the contradiction between his faith in the Bible and his role as an enslaver. Bayliss later manumitted Willis and nineteen others, but, in order to prevent Elsie from being "sold" further south, Willis asked Chester to purchase the rights to her and agreed to work for Chester as a way to repay him. The Hamilton's soon learned that Chester had written a misleading contract with Willis and later intended to transfer his legal rights to a trader who would take them both to New Orleans.

When the Hamilton's sent the letter to Bayliss, they never suspected that Chester, who served as the Postmaster in Jonesborough Tennessee, would seize the letter, write a series of letters pretending to be Bayliss and eventually ask them to come to Toledo to see him on a make believe death-bed. Suspicious of the request to come to Ohio, Haviland, her son Daniel and James Martin, an African American man in the community, set out to investigate the situation with Martin masquerading as Willis. When they arrived, Chester posed as the doctor caring for a pretend Bayliss who was actually his son. Chester tried to trick Martin into entering an empty room where he could be captured and then threatened to kill him if he did not help them recapture the Hamilton's. Martin and Haviland acted as if they were going to help Chester, but on their train ride back to Raisin, he and his assistants suspected Haviland of deceiving them and held a gun to her head. Before the conductor put Chester and his accomplices off the train, Chester vowed to recapture the Hamilton's. Haviland reports that 40 residents of Sylvania, the Ohio town where the southerner's left the train, were prepared to destroy the train tracks to prevent any train from taking the Hamilton's through Toledo.

Encouraged by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Haviland says, Chester attempted again in the early 1850's to recapture the Hamilton's. A series of events took him to Ypsilanti and Detroit where he ultimately received a warrant to arrest the Gordon family who, he convinced Judge Ross Wilkins, were the Hamilton's. Wilkins notified George DeBaptiste of Detroit , who warned an Ypsilanti Underground Railroad activist of Chester's plan to capture the Hamilton's. Though Ypsilanti residents did not know a family named Hamilton, they attempted to find them. Unable to do so, they decided to follow the people who sought to recapture them from the train depot and assist the Hamilton's. When the officer and Chester arrived at the Gordon's, the officer hand-cuffed David Gordon until he was convinced of the families true identity by Gordon's free papers and Chester's violent act of placing a gun to the head of Gordon's wife and the face of their young daughter. The officer refused to arrest the Gordon's and Chester returned again to Tennessee without the Hamilton's who lived safely in Canada.

Haviland, Laura. A Woman's Life- Work. Walden & Stowe, Cincinnati, 1882.

Lindquist, Charles The Anti-Slavery and Underground Railroad Movement in Lenawee County. 1999.