The story below is a draft that has not yet been published in a Secrets of the Eastern Shore book. If you are interested in the inspiring true-life stories of the heroes of Underground Railroad times on Delmarva, the book to get is Tubman Travels: 32 Underground Railroad Journeys on Delmarva.
OK, Here is that story about Delaware’s Samuel Burris:
There’s something wrong in the scene that unfolded at the State House in Dover, Del. on a September day in 1848. There, up on a platform, stood our hero. The only drawing I’ve seen of Samuel Burris shows him as quite the dapper gentleman. A tailored suit and bow tie. Tall top hat, worn at a jaunty angle. His beard, impeccably trimmed. His gaze, steady and confident.
Samuel Burris
This rather dapper look lands on the unexpected side of history, considering that the color of Burris’s skin is black. Many black men were slaves in the 1840s. The black men who ranked as “free” tended to be working class or poor. There were some gentlemanly high-society types, to be sure. Think Frederick Douglass. But they were more exception than rule.
How Samuel Burris came into this class is unclear. Best guess: He had exceptional parents. We don’t know much about them, beyond this: They were free black landowners in Willow Grove, Del., and they raised a young man folks in his day regarded as “educated” and “erudite.”
Risking It All on the Underground Railroad
The Samuel Burris on that platform at the State House did not look like a gentleman. He was up on a slave auction block, just another piece of human chattel. We’ve all seen paintings of such scenes. Were his hands bound? His feet shackled?
Free men really did get sold into slavery now and then. Sometimes that happened in nefarious fashion—by kidnapping, or with forged “ownership” papers. Other times it happened according to the letter of the law, ordered by a judge.
Samuel Burris was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and he got busted.
Born in 1813, Burris would have been 35ish years old that day. He was married, the father of six. He worked as a teacher. He seems to have had blacksmithing skills. Perhaps he owned farmland, like his parents.
His shadow job on the Underground Railroad had him working alongside some first-rate heroes of Delaware history. Burris, Thomas Garrett, and John Hunn were the men behind the much-celebrated escape from bondage of Sam and Emeline Harris and their children. (That’s one of the “32 Underground Railroad Adventures” that make up my book, Tubman Travels.) There’s a good chance Burris worked with Harriet Tubman at one point or another, though there’s no documentation of that that I’m aware of.
The risks Burris and his comrades took were immense. They’d seen white and black colleagues punished with jail time and break-the-bank fines. They knew black colleagues who’d been sold as slaves on judges’ orders. They’d heard of colleagues beaten and sometimes killed by angry vigilantes.
But they kept at it.
Sentenced to Slavery: The Conviction of Samuel Burris
The trouble that led to the auction block started in Smyrna, 1847. A slave named Marie Matthews got caught trying to pass as a free woman while boarding a steamboat headed north. Investigators tracked her arrival at the steamboat dock to a stagecoach. The driver of that coach fingered Samuel Burris as her helper.
The legal case against Burris grew messy. Other accusers surfaced, and he ended up facing charges in multiple escapes. He was acquitted of helping Marie Matthews, but convicted on other charges. The judge sentenced him to 14 months in jail and then decreed that he would be sold after that into a 14-year term of slavery.
Even this turn of events failed to scare Samuel Burris away from the cause of freedom. He smuggled anti-slavery letters out of the jailhouse, and those letters were printed in in abolitionist newspapers up north.
A Bidding War with a Surprise Ending
Back to the auction block. Can you picture a crowd of eager bidders? Two men ended up in a bidding war over Burris, and the winner in that was a man named Isaac Flint. There are vague reports in the historical record that Flint won the bid in underhanded fashion, by offering his bidding opponent a bribe.
Thomas Garret
The final price was $500. That’s nearly $20,000 in today’s money.
We don’t know the details of this moment. Did some auction block security guy lead Burris over to his new “owner?” Burris had never seen Flint before. Perhaps Flint proceeded to lead his new “property” away from the crowd.
Once the two got far enough away, Flint leaned over to Burris and whispered this in his ear:
“Not to fear, you have been purchased with abolitionist gold.”
Burris’s friends in Philadelphia—the activists involved in the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society—had done a round of fundraising on his behalf. They’d sent Flint down to Dover with a wad of cash.
Burris was soon reunited with his family in Philadelphia
Continuing the Work in California
Even after this close call Burris wasn’t done with that shadow work. Newspaper reports place him back in Delaware, giving speeches in churches. A petition that made the rounds in the town of Camden demanded that local officials do something to keep this notorious Samuel Burris character out of town.
Eventually, however, the risks grew too much even for Samuel Burris. First, Burris took precautions for his loved ones, moving his wife and children up to the free state of Pennsylvania to try and insulate them from the dangers of his Underground Railroad in Delaware. The end of that work came when Delaware passed a law setting the punishment for helping slaves escape at 60 lashes.
Everyone knew what that many lashes added up to—the death sentence.
Burris and his family moved west, to California. He had siblings living there. Newspaper reports from this time have him raising money to help escaped slaves who’d found their way to California settle into new lives.
Burris died in 1863, at about age 60. He lived long enough to see Abraham Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation, but not long enough to see slavery come to a complete end. He is buried in Colma, a town near San Francisco.
The Pardon, 167 Years Later
In 2015, 167 years after Samuel Burris was convicted, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell issued a formal pardon. A historic marker honoring Burris stands today near his birthplace, along Willow Grove Road at the intersection with Henry Cowgill Road.
–posted by Jim Duffy in November 2025 for Secrets of the Eastern Shore/Whimbrel Creations LLC. Thank you for spending time with this story.
NOTE: Don’t forget: A whole book of inspiring Underground Railroad stories awaits in Tubman Travels: 32 Underground Railroad Journeys on Delmarva.
