Situated in Maryland’s northeastern corner and sharing a twenty-four-mile border with Pennsylvania, Cecil County occupied a pivotal position between slavery and freedom in the antebellum era. Its railroads, rivers, canals, and roads made the county a natural crossroads for enslaved people moving north across the upper Chesapeake in search of liberty. Well-known figures such as Frederick Douglass and Henry “Box” Brown passed through this region on their journeys to freedom. Yet the Underground Railroad did not only pass through Cecil County—enslaved people living here also risked everything for independence, leaving behind local legacies of courage that deserve remembrance.
Long before the term “Underground Railroad” entered the American vocabulary in the 1830s, Cecil County witnessed extraordinary acts of self-emancipation during the American Revolution.1 In the late summer of 1777, as roughly 15,000 British soldiers landed on the Elk Neck Peninsula with orders to march on Philadelphia, at least four enslaved men seized their chance. Amid the turmoil of war, they risked everything to transform the invasion into an opportunity—choosing liberty over bondage.
General William Howe, commander of British forces in North America, divided his battalions, sending some troops into southern Cecil County. These forces occupied the small village of St. Augustine—then known as Cecil Church—where they reorganized, rested, and reprovisioned at the edge of the Lower Counties (Delaware). The encampment lay amid fertile Eastern Shore farmland and sprawling plantations, where chattel slavery sustained the region’s prosperity.2
At the center of this crossroads stood St. Augustine Episcopal Church, its roots reaching back to the late seventeenth century. North Sassafras Parish was established in 1692, and three years later, the original “Manor Chapel” was built, anchoring the community in both faith and history.3
Throughout the war, British authorities issued proclamations promising protection and freedom to enslaved people who fled their Patriot enslavers and sought refuge with the Crown. One such directive, the Phillipsburg Proclamation, sent a powerful message wherever British troops appeared. As the Encyclopedia of Philadelphia notes, British occupation brought a stark choice: remain in bondage or risk everything for the uncertain promise of freedom.4 Historian Maya Jasanoff in Liberty’s Exiles amplifies this observation, estimating that as many as 20,000 enslaved people across the colonies pursued liberty by joining the British.5
Four Men Choose Freedom
During the 1777 occupation of the county, four men from the plantations around Bohemia Manor acted decisively. Abraham Bayard, age 30, escaped chattel slavery, fleeing from the 300-acre plantation of Samuel Bayard along the Bohemia River, just two miles from St. Augustine.6 He was joined by Thomas Boyle, 26; Pima Johnston, 60; and Joseph Smith, 54. Together, they fled to the British encampment, boldly exchanging the certainty of bondage for the uncertain hope of freedom under British protection.7
Their names—and their acts of defiance—were recorded in a British military register, known as “The Book of Negroes.” This register also documents other freedom seekers connected to Cecil County, though not directly linked to the 1777 invasion. Philip Morgan, age 35, who obtained freedom in 1776; Gabriel Philiox, 22, who obtained freedom in 1778, and Cato Ramsey, 50, who escaped in 1778.
Another glimpse of a local freedom seeker in the Revolutionary era emerged after the war. In 1785, the Maryland Journal published an advertisement placed by James Hutchings, offering a $40 reward for a man named Ned, described as having been with the British for some time. Hutchings had purchased Ned from the estate of Robert Alexander, Esq., a wealthy attorney, politician, and large landowner in Elkton who fled with General Howe during the British march on Philadelphia in 1777.8
Preserving Their Stories
As the war ended and the British prepared to evacuate New York, Sir Guy Carleton, commander of British forces in America, ordered the creation of the military register to document those who would evacuate with the Royal fleet. That record—containing nearly 3,000 names of Africans—includes the seven men from Cecil County, preserving their stories as part of a broader narrative of enslaved people who seized freedom amid revolutionary upheaval.
The courageous stand for human dignity taken by Abraham Bayard, Thomas Boyle, Pima Johnston, Joseph Smith, and others during this era reminds us that the struggle for freedom in Cecil County did not begin with the Underground Railroad of the nineteenth century. Long before the Civil War, those in bondage here risked their lives to claim liberty, leaving traces of courage that connect the Revolution to later generations of freedom seekers. Their stories are part of a larger continuum, showing how both bondage and the unyielding pursuit of emancipation long marked Cecil County’s landscape from the colonial era onward.
Author’s Note: St. Augustine Episcopal Church has been formally designated a site in the National Park Service Network to Freedom. This site, where those in bondage seized an opportunity for liberation in 1777, underscores how the long struggle for self-emancipation unfolded across generations, linking the era of the revolution to later paths toward emancipation. This nomination was made possible through a collaborative effort involving St. Augustine Church, the National Park Service, the Maryland Office of Tourism, and Cecil County Tourism.
Notes
- National Park Service, Exploring a Common Past: Researching and Interpreting the Underground Railroad (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1998), 3–4, https://npshistory.com/publications/ugrr/researching-interpreting.pdf. The NPS notes that before the first railroad lines existed, the phrase “Underground Railroad” would have had no clear meaning to the public, but in the 1830s, it had come into common usage. ↩︎
- Joseph A. Seymour, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777, U.S. Army Campaigns of the Revolutionary War (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2025), 37–41. See this volume for a full account of the Philadelphia Campaign. ↩︎
- Effie DeCoursey LeFevre. 1932. The Manor Chapel or St. Augustine Church: St. Augustine Parish, Cecil County, Maryland: An Historical Sketch. St. Augustine, Md.: E.D. LeFevre. ↩︎
- Jean R. Soderlund, “British Occupation of Philadelphia,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Rutgers University, 2016. Whenever His Majesty’s Troops occupied an area, it provided a choice for enslaved residents, as it offered the possibility of freedom with escape from enslavers, notes the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. ↩︎
- Maya Jasanoff, Liberty Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011. A foundational study of loyalist migration that documents the experience of enslaved people who sought freedom by joining British forces during the Revolution. ↩︎
- Peter Bayard Inventory, December 31, 1766 – January 3, 1767. Cecil County Inventories, Liber 95, folio 83. Maryland Prerogative Court Records, Maryland State Archives. ↩︎
- Library and Archives Canada. “Book of Negroes.” The names of the Freedom Seekers were located in the digitized edition of the Book available at the library. ↩︎
- “Advertisement,” Maryland Journal (Baltimore, Maryland) XII, no. 71, September 6, 1785: [3]. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. ↩︎