Yorkshire Almanac The Leeds abolitionist Wilson Armistead submits his census return, including the names of two lodgers – the escaped American slaves, William and Ellen Craft

31 March 1851: The Leeds abolitionist Wilson Armistead submits his census return, including the names of two lodgers – the escaped American slaves, William and Ellen Craft

Leeds Mercury. 1851/04/12. Remarkable Return in the Census. Leeds. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

REMARKABLE RETURN IN THE CENSUS.-DISGRACE TO AMERICA. Wm. and Ellen Craft, who gave last week, at the Woodhouse Mechanics’ Institute, so touching an account of their escape from slavery, were the guests of our esteemed fellow-townsman, Mr. Wilson Armistead. Being that gentleman’s lodgers on the 30th of March, it was requisite that their names and places of nativity, as well as their rank and profession, should be inserted by him in the Government census paper to be filled up and returned on the 31st. These two individuals were accordingly entered by Mr. Armistead under their real designation “Fugitives from Slavery in America, the land of their nativity.” What a disgrace to a professedly free and christian country as America that such an acknowledgment should have to be made. That it should be published to all the world that America’s own born citizens are driven to seek refuge in a foreign clime from the man-stealer, and from the horrors of slavery. The fugitives arrived about four months since in Liverpool, where, for the first time, they set foot on really free soil. They are very interesting and intelligent persons. Ellen is a gentle, refined-looking young creature of twenty-four years, as fair as most of her British sisters, and in mental qualifications their equal too. William is very dark, but of a reflective intelligent countenance, and of manly and dignified deportment.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Read the story in their Wikipedia entry! Can someone produce the census entry?

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Read the story in their Wikipedia entry! Can someone produce the census entry?

Something to say? Get in touch

6 November 1786: William Butterworth of Leeds witnesses the “grand pageant” celebrating the demise in July of Duke Ephraim, Efik king of Old Calabar

21 May 1785: Aged 15, William Butterworth of Leeds runs away to sea and joins a slaver

25 September 1705: Daniel Defoe is amazed by Leeds’s outdoor cloth market on Briggate, shortly before the opening of the white cloth hall

24 June 1981: Leeds City Council declares its opposition to nuclear weapons and resolves to inform the world thereof

24 September 1862: Having bet his shirt on blockade-running to the Confederates, Hull mayor Zachariah Pearson tells of his ruin by Lombard Street and Abraham Lincoln

17 January 1832: A waning Paganini plays for a grateful but declining public at Leeds Music Hall

11 January 1825: American comment on William Hirst of Leeds’s revolutionary and controversial labour-saving improvements to spinning and stubbing machines, patented today

24 October 1877: Six years after the inauguration of its horse trams, the Leeds Tramways Company tests a steam car by Kitson and Co. of Hunslet

Reproduction through the blind benevolence of Leeds Other Paper (RIP).1 April 1979: Amid motorway mania in Leeds, West Yorkshire Council is today to reveal plans to link Chapeltown and Woodhouse by a ¼-mile suspension bridge across Meanwood Beck

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Via Remember LOP, a feed by Tony Harcup which pays tribute to some splendid local journalism, unimaginable today.

Council sources claim the scheme was a victim of the first wave of cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher following her General Election victory a month later.

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