Jordan Grant
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Jordan Grant
@jordangrant.bsky.social
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Public historian studying Early America & Digital History
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In 1847, Robert Cromwell was rescued from slave-catchers *in a federal courthouse* in part because of a judge’s quiet assistance. From what I know, that judge was never convicted of a crime.

I hope cases like Cromwell’s (and Joshua Glover's) give hope to folks in Wisconsin this weekend.
As the day ended on April 14, 1847, sounds of a struggle echoed behind the locked doors of the U.S. District Courthouse in Detroit, Michigan. Three slave-catchers strained to keep hold of Robert Cromwell. One of the three, a city constable, tried to "cram a handkerchief down" Cromwell's throat and stifle his cries. But Cromwell was not daunted. Later, newspapers would describe how the formerly enslaved man, filled with "energy imparted from a feeling that it was a desperate struggle for LIBERTY," dragged his would-be captors to one of the courthouse's windows and bellowed for help. As Cromwell's shouts echoed down Jefferson Avenue, the slave-catchers' carefully laid plans began to unravel. Ross Wilkins, the federal judge who was scheduled to oversee Cromwell's summary reenslavement under the authority of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, retreated to the building's attic to avoid involving himself in the case. At the same time, a mob of Cromwell's "colored friends and others" rallied outside the courthouse's doors and—with the help of a key provided by one of Wilkin's abandoned clerks— soon "found their way in." Cromwell was escorted to another part of the city under the crowd's protection. David Dunn, the Missouri slaveholder who had hoped to reenslave Cromwell, was chased into a nearby store, charged with kidnapping, and sent to the Wayne County jail. Weeks passed. As Dunn waited for his criminal trial to begin, Cromwell left the city and crossed over to Canada, a second escape that put him safely beyond his former enslaver's reach. The symbolic importance of Cromwell’s deliverance was not lost on contemporaries. His daytime rescue from nothing less than a “vestibule of a United States Court of Justice” showcased the strength of the anti-slavery movement as the fourth decade of the nineteenth century came to an end. This strength was based, in large part, on anti-slavery forces’ willingness to embrace both extra-legal and legal tactics to resist slave-catchers...
April 25, 2025 at 9:14 PM