1Maria Lewis
Maria Lewis was a 17-year-old emancipated slave who disguised herself as a white guy and fought in a Union cavalry unit for over two years.
2Lewis Williams
Lewis Williams was an escaped slave who managed to evade recapture by switching with a body double at his crowded trial and then crossdressing as a woman to flee town. He was aided by a reverend, who dressed him up as his “daughter” with a veil and bonnet, then got him out of town.
3Sara Forbes Bonetta
Sara Forbes Bonetta was a West African who was orphaned, sold into slavery, and in a remarkable twist of events, was liberated from enslavement and became a goddaughter to Queen Victoria.
4Solomon Northup
Solomon Northup, a free African American living in New York in the 1800s, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south. As a slave, he had no way to testify his case. He remained a slave for 12 years before finally being freed. He then wrote a memoir “Twelve Years A Slave.”
5Oney Judge
An escaped slave of George Washington, Oney Judge lived her life as a fugitive in New Hampshire and provided historians the most detailed account of slavery at Mount Vernon.
6William Ellis
William Ellis was a Texas-born slave who crossed the border to slavery-free Mexico and became a millionaire. Later on, he attempted to bring African Americans to Mexico and even served as a diplomat of the US to the King of Ethiopia.
7Jerry
In 1851 was a runaway slave named Jerry was arrested in Syracuse, New York during the anti-slavery Liberty Party's convention. A crowd of hundreds of abolitionists broke into the city jail and freed Jerry, eventually smuggling him to Canada. Nine participants in the rescue also fled to avoid prosecution.
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8Onesimus
An African slave named Onesimus taught colonists in Boston how to inoculate themselves against smallpox. The treatment had been common in China and Africa for centuries.
9Wheeling Gaunt
Wheeling Gaunt was a slave who bought his and his family's freedom in 1845 before moving to Yellow Springs, Ohio. At the time of his death, he bequeathed a large portion of his land and estate to the village under the condition that each widow be given flour annually, which continues to this day.
10Mary Bowser
Mary Bowser was a freed slave with a Quaker education and a photographic memory, posed as a slow-witted slave to spy for the Union in Confederate President Jefferson Davis' household through much of the Civil War.
