Dr. Richard Eells House

On the night of August 21, 1842, a man named Charley swam the Mississippi out of Missouri and came up dripping in Quincy, Illinois. A free Black man named Barryman Barnett found him and brought him to the back door of Dr. Richard Eells at 415 Jersey Street — the president of the Adams County Anti-Slavery Society, four blocks from the river, at what was effectively Stop Number One on the northern route out of a slave state.

Eells gave Charley dry clothes and drove him toward the Mission Institute, but the slave catchers were already watching the road — they saw Charley's head lift from under the buffalo robe. Charley jumped from the carriage and ran across the cemetery; he was captured that night and returned to Missouri, and his fate is unknown. The posse forced their way into Eells's house and found the wet clothes — the evidence that convicted him.

The case went all the way up. Justice of the Peace Henry Asbury charged Eells with harboring a fugitive; Stephen A. Douglas — Lincoln's future debate opponent — presided over the circuit court trial and fined him $400. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed; the appeal was headed to the U.S. Supreme Court when Eells died on a steamboat crossing the Ohio at Cincinnati — and the Court heard it anyway. He had become president of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty Party's presidential candidate while his conviction for helping a man who swam a river to freedom was being appealed.

The Eells House is the archive's harboring file — the house where a wet man at the back door became a Supreme Court case, and where the crime of sheltering a fugitive was prosecuted by the nation whose conscience the defendant was trying to change.