PASSION BEARER REV. SAMUEL GREEN

In April of 1857, Sam Green, an esteemed elderly Methodist preacher, was returning to Cambridge, Maryland after visiting his son in Canada. His son had been helped to freedom by the new Moses of her people, Blessed Harriet Tubman. After coming back to Maryland, he was visited in the middle of the night by a group of men who forcibly searched his house and found a copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe. For this he was put on trial, and the results were recorded in the Cambridge Democrat on May 20, 1857:

In the case of the State against Sam Green, (free negro) who was tried at the April term of the Circuit Court of this county, for having in his possession abolition pamphlets, among which was Uncle Tom's Cabin, [and] has been found guilty by the court, and sentenced to the penitentiary for the term of ten years-until the 14th of May, 1867.

The final sentence adds: "Slavery must be protected or it may be abolished." William Still, in his Underground Railroad Records of 1872, reflects on this event:

"In this dark hour the friends of the Slave could do little more than sympathize with this heart-stricken and grey-headed father. The aged follower of the Rejected and Crucified had like Him to bear the "reproach of many," and make his bed with the wicked in the Penitentiary. Doubtless there were a few friends in his neighborhood who sympathized with him, but they were powerless to aid the old man. But thanks to a kind Providence, the great deliverance brought about during the Rebellion by which so many captives were freed also unlocked Samuel Green's prison doors and he was allowed to go free.

After his liberation from the Penitentiary, we had from his own lips narrations of his years of suffering-of the bitter cup that he was compelled to drink, and of his being sustained by the almighty Arm."