James Matthews, Runaway Slave: Four Holes Swamp to Maine

“Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave” ran in five installments in The Emancipator, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s New York paper, from August 23 to October 18, 1838, after first appearing in Maine’s Advocate of Freedom on August 2. The narrator gave no name. In the 2010s a Clemson University English professor, Susanna Ashton, worked out that he was James Matthews, born enslaved on a plantation beside Four Holes Swamp in what is now Dorchester County, who hid in the swamp before he got out and lived the rest of his life in Hallowell, Maine. In October 2020 the National Park Service added Four Holes Swamp to its Underground Railroad Network to Freedom on the strength of that research.

Who was James Matthews?

He was born near Four Holes Swamp, about 25 miles from Charleston by his own reckoning. His birth year is uncertain: the Advocate called him about twenty in 1838, a Post and Courier account puts his birth near 1808, and a French slave-narrative database says about 1816. His mother died when he was a baby and his father not long after. He was the legal property of a widow he called Mistress Smith, worked her farm as a child alongside about twenty other children, and was hired out for two years to a Colonel Billy Mallard on Dean Swamp.

At about fourteen he was given to Alfred Smith, the widow’s oldest son, at Bethel. Smith later sold him to David Cohen, a wealthy man who lived about twelve miles outside Charleston, identified in one account as a son of Mordecai Cohen of that city. Cohen sold him in late 1837 to John Fogle, who put him to work on the railroad. The narrative that came out of this is not gentle. It describes whippings, hunger, a barrel studded with nails, the death of a seven-year-old girl named Margaret, and the Sugar House jail in Charleston, with names and street addresses the abolitionist editors said could be checked.

How did he hide in the swamp?

He ran at least twice. The first time, after a whipping over stolen melons, he went into the swamp at night and ran until midnight, when he found a camp of other people who had done the same. He stayed two or three weeks, lying up in thickets by day and going out at night for food. He and another man were caught asleep by a brook while hunting plums; Cohen’s overseer shot the other man in the back and killed him, and Matthews was whipped and sent back to the fields.

The second time, in December 1837, John Fogle placed an advertisement in the Charleston Courier for a fugitive named Jim he had bought from David D. Cohen a few weeks before. He thought Jim might be hiding near Four Hole Swamp, where he had been raised. Nobody collected the reward. According to the Post and Courier’s account of Ashton’s research, Matthews boarded a train for Charleston, met a ship worker from Boston, and was smuggled north by sea. In Boston a free Black man helped him on to Hallowell, Maine.

Camps like that one are what historians call maroon communities. Timothy James Lockley, writing in 2009, estimated that only a few thousand of South Carolina’s enslaved people ever reached the North. Ashton has called Matthews’s journey “incredibly rare.”

What is “Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave”?

In Hallowell, the Maine Anti-Slavery Society’s paper, the Advocate of Freedom, printed the first installment on August 2, 1838. The account was dictated to a writer identified as “J,” handed to a second person “A,” and read back to the young man to check. The editor, William Smyth, wrote that the scars on the author’s back vouched for the story. The Emancipator reprinted it in New York over five issues that fall; that is the version cataloged at the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South. The Advocate ran a follow-up in 1839 describing the author working for a farmer and going to school.

How did Susanna Ashton identify him?

Ashton, who chairs Clemson’s English department, and her student researchers matched the anonymous narrator to James Matthews, a Black laborer who appears in the Hallowell census of 1850, 1860, and 1880 with parents listed as born in South Carolina. Local records show him in and out of an asylum. He died poor, working the poor farm. Ashton published the case as “Recollecting Jim.” A Hallowell artist, Christopher Cart, later painted him.

The identification is a judgment, not a signed confession. The 1837 advertisement for “Jim,” the swamp, the Cohen and Fogle names, and the Hallowell census line up.

The Network to Freedom and the signs on the boardwalk

The National Park Service listed “Four Holes Swamp” as a site in its National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in a news release dated October 9, 2020. It is one of nine such sites in South Carolina. Audubon South Carolina, which owns the Francis Beidler Forest sanctuary in the middle of the swamp, sought the listing after Ashton’s work.

In spring 2023 Audubon, Ashton, and the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston put six interpretive signs along the sanctuary’s 1.75-mile boardwalk, paid for by a National Park Service grant through the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. On September 16, 2023, during International Underground Railroad Month, U.S. Rep. James E. Clyburn, Ashton, Audubon, and Park Service staff marked the designation at the sanctuary. Clyburn called the people who sought freedom “among these very trees” a reminder of the strength of the human spirit. Ashton said it “helps us expand our understanding of the word, ‘sanctuary.’”

Can you walk where he hid?

Yes, within limits. The Audubon Center at Francis Beidler Forest is at 336 Sanctuary Road, Harleyville, SC 29448, open Wednesday through Saturday 9 to 5 and Sunday 11 to 4, $12 for adults and $7 for children 6 to 12. The old-growth forest there has never been logged, so what you see from the boardwalk is close to what Matthews saw from the ground. Which thicket was his, nobody knows. The signs do not pretend otherwise.

The swamp has kept its share of people. Most of them did not write anything down.

The dispatches on this site run through this same ground, and the county history page sets Matthews beside the planters and preachers who left more paper. Start with /the-edisto-keeps-its-own/, then /history/ and /map/. The swamp itself has its own page at /four-holes-swamp-beidler-forest/.

James Matthews and the Freedom Seekers of Four Holes Swamp