Samuel Green (freedman)

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Samuel Green c. 1860

Samuel Green (c. 1802–?) was an African-American slave, freedman, and minister, who was jailed in 1857 for possessing a copy of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

He was born in East New Market, Maryland to slave parents and worked as a slave until 1832, when a provision in his deceased owner's will enabled him to buy his freedom. Samuel then worked as a farmer and as a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Dorchester County, Maryland. He was able to buy the freedom of his wife Catherine but not that of his two children, Samuel Jr. (born 1829) and Susan (born 1832).

Samuel Jr. escaped to Canada in 1854 with the help of Harriet Tubman and probably became involved in the underground railroad, helping slaves escape. This cast suspicion of similar involvement on his father, and in 1857 the Dorchester County sheriff searched Green's house and found a letter from Samuel Jr. naming two slaves who had escaped to Canada in that year, and a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Green was arrested on April 4, 1857 and charged with "knowingly having in his possession a certain abolition pamphlet called 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' of an inflammatory character and calculated to create discontent amongst the colored population of this State" and "knowingly having in his possession certain abolition papers and pictorial representation of an inflammatory character calculated to create discontent amongst the colored population of this State."

He was acquitted on the second charge, but convicted on the first, and on 14 May 1857 he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.

The case caused a great deal of concern, with abolitionists calling for Green to be released and slaveholders calling for him to remain in jail. John Dixon Long wrote in 1857:

Dorchester County is almost exclusively a Methodist County. If the members of the M. E. Church of Dorchester had been liberty-loving, slavery-hating Methodists, no judge or jury would have dared to consign their brother in Christ to ten years' incarceration in a State prison, separated from wife and children, for having a book in his possession which might have been found on the shelves of the very Judge that pronounced the sentence. To the best of my recollection, I never saw a jury at any County Court on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that was not partially composed of members of the M. E. Church. The Judge who pronounced the sentence was, when I was a boy, a member of the New-school Presbyterian Church in Snow Hill, Md.; and, I presume, he is still a member of that church. He ought to have resigned his seat rather than have pronounced such a sentence. The Methodists of Maryland could have poor Green pardoned in six months, should they desire it. May the prayers of all the good go up to the Throne of Grace for this oppressed brother! I blush for my native State when I think of her bloody code of laws--a code that would disgrace a savage tribe. I blush for the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the Baptists of Maryland, who, united, could wipe off from the statute book the black laws that tarnish her fair fame. Maryland denies the humanity of one hundred thousand slaves, and oppresses seventy-five thousand free negroes. May the Omnipotent speed the hour when American slavery shall be blasted by the thunders of His power, amidst the shoutings and hallelujahs of a redeemed race!

The governor of Maryland, Thomas Holliday Hicks, sided with the slaveholders, but his successor Augustus Bradford freed Green in 1862, on condition that he leave Maryland. Green and his wife emigrated to Canada. Their daughter Susan remained in slavery in Missouri.