Letter from America

A LETTER which documents President Franklin Pierce's pardon of a black man who sheltered runaway slaves went up for sale in America recently. The 1854 presidential pardon, which is said to be worth $75,000, grants clemency to Noah C. Hanson, who was convicted three years earlier of hiding two runaway slaves under the kitchen floor of his employer's Washington D.C. home.

The document is the only known presidential pardon of a black man convicted of protecting runaway slaves. "This rare manuscript highlights the important role that free Africans in the North played within the Underground Railroad and the risks that they took to free slaves," said Steven Raab, founder of The Raab Collection, and owner of the document. The Underground Railroad was a secret network that helped black slaves reach freedom in northern states after they escaped from southern slave owners in the 1800s.

Stanley Harrold, a professor of history at South Carolina State University who has written a book about abolitionists in the nation's capital - including the Hanson case, said he knew of no other pardon of its kind. "There was an earlier pardon by President Fillmore of two white men imprisoned in D.C. for helping slaves escape, but as far as I know the Noah Hanson one is the only presidential pardon for a black man who did something similar," he said.

Hanson, a free black man, was arrested after it was discovered that he was hiding the runaway slaves, who belonged to a South Carolina congressman, in the home of his employer - himself a Southerner and who later served as a colonel in the Confederate Army. Hanson was sentenced to remain in prison until a $1,080 fine was paid, but his fellow abolitionists were unsuccessfully in raising the funds.

In the signed presidential pardon, Pierce orders Hanson's release from prison and from the requirement that he shall be again committed as a prisoner unless the fine was paid.

Historians are unsure about what happened to Hanson after he was released from prison.