Franklin County was home to a large number of African Americans: 1,788 people identified in the census as black or of mixed race lived there. Franklin held the fifth highest number of black residents in the state, with eight other Pennsylvania counties not far behind. Black families had several reasons for living in Franklin County. Eight out of ten had been born there. Slavery had been well established in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century and had been especially strong in the southern part of the state, where the farms differed little from those just across the Maryland border. Free blacks from beyond Pennsylvania had come from Maryland (228) and Virginia (133). They had probably not run away, since they would be vulnerable to capture so close to the Mason-Dixon line. More likely, they had bought or received their freedom and had then moved to free soil close to families and friends still in slavery.

Black families lived in most of Franklin's townships, but most tended to live near one another in the southernmost parts of the county. Montgomery Township, home of the town of Mercersburg, accounted for the largest concentration of black Franklin citizens: nearly four hundred. A few families owned real estate worth one or two hundred dollars in the district, but none listed themselves as farmers or owned enough land to make a living as farmers. Alexander Watson and two of his teen-aged sons labored as butchers in Mercersburg, but all of the other men worked as unskilled laborers or farm hands. Their wives and daughters worked in far higher proportions than their white counterparts, with 35 of them serving as domestics or washerwomen. Not surprisingly, these families found it difficult to amass property; only 20 owned real estate. Most owned nothing at all, while a few possessed ten or twenty dollars.

The other largest group of African Americans in Franklin lived in the South Ward of Chambersburg. They were apparently unwelcome across Market Street in the other ward, where only a few people of color lived. Twenty-one of the 145 black men in the South Ward worked as artisans, among them John Barnes as a mason, Lewis Downey a fence maker, Henry Jackson a chimney sweep, William Jones a hostler, Moses Jones a whitesmith, Joseph Lindsey a tinker, Henry Stewart an axe maker, Andrew Valentine a brick maker, and James Wilson a cutler. Four men worked as blacksmiths, including Alex Thompson, a master at the craft. Three men were barbers, one a Methodist minister, and one, Leonard Collins, a phrenologist--the only one in town-- reading a person's character by the irregularities on his or her skull. Some people, such as the waiter Daniel Loudon, the day laborers Robert Campbell and William Cunningham, or the farmer Henry Shoeman somehow managed to attain property worth several thousand dollars, but they were the exceptions. Most black people in Franklin's largest town worked in the same jobs as other black people throughout the North--laborers, porters, waiters, shoeblacks, cooks, and servants--and had just as little to show for it.

The black women of Chambersburg labored as domestics, washerwomen, and seamstresses. And as in virtually every town in the country, black women outnumbered black men by a considerable proportion--933 females to 866 males--since men found few opportunities for work in town and women tended to outlive men. Over thirty of these women headed households of their own, a far higher percentage than among whites, and their lives were especially precarious. They earned less money than men and had few alternatives to working in the homes of white people.

The black people of Franklin maintained quite large households, with a number of generations living under the same roof or nearby. The 49 members of the Cuff family, for example, all settled in southern Franklin in the Montgomery Township; of the 30 Scotts, all but 6 lived in Chambersburg's South Ward; 48 Stoner family members lived in southern Franklin, with some in Mercersburg and some in the country. The 1,788 black people in Franklin, in fact, shared only 374 different names. Some of the names--Berry, Burgess, Lewis, Little, Patterson, and Stevenson--were held by both black and mulatto families. People deemed "mulatto" by the census taker generally had less money than those deemed "black." Any past relationships with white people brought no rewards.

African Americans in Franklin, like those throughout the North, sought security in a threatening world. Their large families and close proximity supplied networks of mutual support. It was easier for poor people to sustain churches and schools in their own neighborhoods. Despite the intense poverty of their families, 255 of 345 black youngsters between the ages of 6 and 16 attended school in 1860--even as many of the teenagers also worked as waiters, laborers, and servants. We can only imagine and infer the sacrifices and accomplishments of Franklin's people of color, for the newspapers, which documented the white community in great detail, spoke only with contempt of their black neighbors. The Transcript, a refined paper, barely mentioned local black people at all. The Valley Spirit attacked and vilified the black people of Franklin at every opportunity. In one especially ugly article, the Valley Spirit resurrected a "report" from twelve years before and claimed that it applied still. It reputedly described a house in Chambersburg: "Here, in this wretched apartment, eight by ten feet square, you may see by the light of that dim lamp, twenty human beings--fourteen women and six children--from a babe a week old to the urchin just entering its teens. Observe their actions and listen to their conversation. What disgusting obscenity! What horrid implications! Their licentious and blasphemous orgies would put to the blush the imps of pandemonium. Drinking whisky and inhaling tobacco smoke you would hardly suppose would keep soul and body together; yet you perceive no indications here that would lead you to suppose they subsist on anything else."

The white papers dwelled on black crime. They encouraged the county court to devote an entire term to "the special purpose of trying the filthy cases among the colored population of our county." Such a session, the Valley Spirit noted sarcastically, would provide the opportunity "to crowd our petty Court House with a crowd of drunken, worthless darkies, who can ornament the building by poking their heads out of the windows, standing around in every hole and corner, and squirting tobacco juice on the passers by." They ridiculed the bitter poverty of the residents of "Toad Island," a black section of Chambersburg. When a wooden building exploded among them it "smashed up into very convenient firewood. The delectable inhabitants of the island took advantage of the disaster and their chimnies were soon observed to smoke as they had seldom smoked before." In language that played off the familiar words of history books, the white editor of the Valley Spirit described in mock language a "battle" in Franklin County among blacks when a fight broke out among them. "Fired with the zeal and warlike disposition of the belligerents over the water, a portion of the sooty sons and daughters of Afric's scorching plains took a notion, on Thursday last, to show that though centuries had passed, they had not forgotten that Hanibal had led their fathers to victory."

Some white people in the county eagerly played the role of bounty hunter for slaveholders, tracking runaway slaves for money. Franklin apparently had more than its share of such men. One nineteenth-century commentator observed that "Along the valley were men who made it a business, not of conscience but of sordid gain, to arrest runaways and return them for the rewards offered." Despite such men, Franklin offered refuge for refugee slaves. The mountains that stood on either side of the county offered places to hide in their thick trees and rocky outcroppings. Fugitives followed the Appalachian Trail, worn by Indians generations before, into upstate New York and then into Canada.

One runaway slave told how slave catchers operated. Sam Davis, hired out to a cruel master in Virginia, headed for freedom. He had not made it very far in Franklin County before two men with guns began to follow him. They announced that they were going to take him before a magistrate in Chambersburg. "By and by," Davis recounted, "watching my chance, I jumped a fence and ran. They were on horseback. I got into a piece of woods--thence into a wheat field, where I lay all day." At dark, Davis resumed his flight, "walking until day, when I came to a colored man's house among the mountains. He gave me a good breakfast, for which I thanked him, and then directed me on the route. I succeeded, after a while, in finding the Underground Railroad." Davis made it to Canada.

Mercersburg, with its black population, reportedly worked as a point on that Underground Railroad. The small town offered a refuge just over the line from slavery; from there, agents and allies worked to spirit slaves into the mountains and along hidden trails farther into freedom. White people from Franklin helped as well. Hiram Wertz of Quincy, on the eastern side of the county, took great risks to aid runaways. A 29 year-old farmer surrounded by well-to-do kinsmen and aided by his wife, Catherine, Wertz was an "ardent" agent of the Underground Railroad. The Wertz family worked with the neighboring Shockey family--a larger family with considerably less money--to aid black people fleeing slavery. Both families had been born in Pennsylvania and were well aware of the risks they took. They ushered runaway slaves into the mountains in "Little Africa" near the Caledonia iron mills.

The relationships of Franklin whites to slavery seldom followed such stark divisions as bounty hunter and agent on the Underground Railroad. It is hard to know what to make of David Dysart, for example. The Dysart family lived in Waynesboro, with little property. One day in Baltimore, however, Dysart, posing as a slaveowner from Virginia, approached a hotel keeper and "proposed to sell him a likely young colored man, stating at the same time that he had no further use for his services, or he would not wish to sell him." The "slave," James Henry Lockwood, interviewed for the position and told the hotel proprietor that he had been living with Dysart for more than six years but that he desired to live in Baltimore "and said he would try and prove useful about the establishment. A purchase was then made, and Mr. Fairbanks paid the sum demanded, $1,300. A day had scarcely elapsed ere Mr. Fairbanks received such information as assured him that he had been deceived, and that the man was not a slave." The sheriff set out for Dysart and found him near a tavern. He offered to return all of the money he had left--$820--and said he could get the rest from a friend back home. Though he did gather the money, Dysart "was left to his reflections in a dark and lonely cell," charged with fraud. The white man eventually got out on bail, but the black man paid a heavy price for his role: he was sold for the costs of the trial.