Last issue recounted the county’s abolitionist movement and the local reaction to slavery. 
In this third and final installment, find out how members of Mifflin County’s black population emigrated to the Caribbean island nation of Haiti in 1861. Based upon articles which appeared in The Sentinel thirty-four years ago, these brief accounts reflect information originally written by local historian and newspaper editor, J. Martin Stroup. Read about...

The 1861 Migration to Haiti

Talk of war and the eventual departure of the Logan Guards that spring occupied much of the local press.
Just weeks before the tempest of the Civil War broke over the nation, a local newspaper reported on an event that would create great interest in the county’s black community - a proposed migration to the island nation of Haiti. The February 28, 1861 edition of the Lewistown Gazette reported on the proposed migration:
A large meeting of our colored population was held Monday last, John L. Griffith in the chair, to take into consideration the propriety of adopting measures to move to Hayti(Haiti). We have no doubt that country offers strong inducements to emigrants, both in climate and production, and that once there, and their houses in order, few would wish themselves back in the United States.
The hopes of the colored man must be in himself and although respected here...his position must always be an inferior one, instead of favoring his advancement, is actually retarding it. 
A month later, March 28, 1861, the Gazette printed this information under the headline, “Emigration” : 
A large meeting of our colored citizens was held in the colored public school house. Prayer was by Rev. William Grimes who chaired the meeting. The Right Rev. Bishop Paine...stated briefly that the time had arrived when the colored man has become a subject of legislation...and his condition can be bettered in no place so well as in Hayti...
Members of the black community planned to investigate the possibilities of this monumental undertaking.

MIGRATION TO HAITI
THE PROMISED LAND?

Those gathered at this meeting elected officers and created an association to further the cause.
The plan to move to a promised land was not without controversy. In the Gazette of March 28, 1861, an item appeared that denied any truth to a rumor going around the community. A letter was allegedly circulated asking the “white brethren” of town to donate funds for the journey. The association sent no such request, although one of its members did.
The group planned to send an agent on ahead to Haiti to check out the possibilities for the move. In the fall of 1861, the Gazette informed the community that:
The colored population has been fluctuating in opinion...of remaining here or going to Hayti (1860 spelling). All was excitement as 70 persons left for the West Indies.
The newspaper listed the names of fourteen families and nine individuals which came to seventy, a sizable departure for a community that numbered in the hundreds of that era.

THE MOVE IS PLANNED

In December of 1861, the local newspaper began reporting on numerous letters sent by the emigrants to relatives back in Mifflin County. The group had left town weeks earlier and reached St. Mare, Haiti on November 2, after “a pleasant voyage of eleven days.” The editor of the Gazette noted, “They speak favorably of their reception and of the country.”
Around the middle of December, 1861, John L. Griffith, who volunteered to go on ahead to Haiti as the group’s agent, reported on the progress of the Lewistown colony.
Griffith said that the fare for transporting 82 Negroes from Lewistown to New York had been $80. Each traveler had been given a $32 outfit and each had $40 that was personally raised. He noted:
They seemed to be contented with their new home...they think they have found the promised land. Forty Negroes from Bellefonte and thirty more from Lewistown would be leaving for Hayti in the spring.
The exact source of the funds was never stated in the newspaper, although a statement appeared in a seemingly related item: “Will not some kind person head a subscription for them with $10 as Mr. T. J. Hoffman did the first.”

WAS IT PARADISE?

By the spring of 1862, disenchantment set in for some in Haiti’s Lewistown colony. Two men returned to town with a discouraging report, but a letter printed in the Gazette from emigrant Archie Saunders told of “the only place on Earth for the colored man.”
For many of the Lewistown emigrants, the French-speaking black island nation would indeed seem like a promised land politically, compared to the United States of the mid-1800s.
By February, 1864, the Gazette printed a letter from S. J. Baptist, former Lewistown resident, stating that those who moved to Haiti two years earlier are doing well. The cotton crop was selling, he reported, at a high price and their initial hard times are over.
Baptist, one of the organizers of the migration from Lewistown also noted, “White people are held in great respect in Hayti.”

HAITIAN RELATIVES 

Mention of the Haitian migration was absent from the Gazette as years passed. Locally, there seemed to be mixed feelings about the success or failure of the movement. In fact, the paper never printed an explanation for the movement or if other groups actually moved to Haiti as was reported in Baptist’s letter.
Although the Gazette of the 1860s never mentioned the reason for the migration, it seems obvious today - freedom, plus better living conditions and employment opportunities were hoped for in Haiti.
The Mifflin County Historical Society’s 1999 video, A Walk Through Lewistown’s History notes as a result of the 1861 migration, Haitians living on that island today, have ancestral roots traced to Mifflin County.

Charles Ball and Richard Barnes Were they one-in-the-same person?

Considering the effects of the Fugitive Slave Acts, an escaped slave wasn’t safe or free from capture, even in Pennsylvania in the 1830s, when Charles Ball and Richard Barnes were living in the area. A slave might change his name to prevent capture while a fugitive, but always remained vigilant if he or she wanted to elude capture.
The after dinner speaker at the historical society’s fall banquet, Dr. Anadolu-Okur, as mentioned on page 5 of this newsletter, made a most interesting point during her lecture on the Underground Railroad. Charles Ball and Richard Barnes, local men who were once slaves, but escaped bondage, were really the same person. Local historian J. Martin Stroup wrote of them as two individuals. However, our speaker cited as her source, a book by author Charles L. Blockson, who states that “Barnes” was really Ball’s alias. 
Perhaps the most famous of the escaped slaves to have lived in Mifflin County was Charles Ball, who escaped to Lewistown. Ball, Maryland slave, was the subject of an important book, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man, published in 1836 and reprinted in a new edition with the title Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave. 
In his narrative, Ball traces his life as a slave in South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland and as a fugitive escaping on the Underground Railroad to Lewistown, using his adopted name, Richard Barnes. Ball died in Lewistown at the age of 104.
From the Hippocrene Guide to The Underground Railroad by Charles L. Blockson NY Hippocrene Books, 1994.

Additional reading on the Underground Railroad site, the Maclay House, can be found in these sources:
* Historic Homes and Buildings of Milroy and Armagh Township by Raymond Harmon 1988.
* Historic Sites Survey, Mifflin County, Pennsylvania by the Mifflin County Planning Commission 1978
* The Sentinel Feb. 17, 1966 - Microfilm files at the MCHS Research Library