The pre-American Civil War practice of kidnapping into slavery in the United States occurred in both free and slave states, and both fugitive slaves and free negroes were transported to slave markets
Tearing up the free-born and manumission papers and kidnapping of a free black, in the U.S. free states, to be sold into Southern slavery, from an 1838 abolitionist anti-slavery almanac
"Kidnapping" (Picture of Slavery in the United States of America by Rev. George Bourne, published by Edwin Hunt in Middletown, Connecticut, 1834)
"The house of Mr. H. Slatter" would have been Hope H. Slatter's slave jail in Baltimore ("Kidnapping" New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 25, 1841)
Jesse Torrey, Jr., depicted recording the narrative of free people who had been kidnapped
Underground Railroad
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The Underground Railroad was an organized network of secret routes and safe houses for fugitive slaves to escape to the abolitionist Northern United States and Eastern Canada during the era of slavery
David Ruggles between two men confronting John P. Darg
Freedom seekers escaped to the Great Dismal Swamp's maroon community.
Harriet Tubman (photo H. B. Lindsley), c. 1870. A worker on the Underground Railroad, Tubman made 13 trips to the South, helping to free over 70 people. She led people to the northern free states and Canada. This helped Harriet Tubman gain the name "Moses of Her People".
Quaker abolitionist Levi Coffin and his wife Catherine helped more than 2,000 enslaved people escape to freedom.