William Parker’s War on Slave Catchers
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
April 3, 1851. A man who escaped slavery is grabbed off the streets of Boston and thrown into a carriage. He fights back, shouting to the crowd, but it doesn’t matter. Under a new federal law, even the North isn’t safe.
The Fugitive Slave Act has turned cities like Boston into hunting grounds. Freedom seekers are being captured, and ordinary citizens are being forced to help.
But across the North, resistance is growing. In Pennsylvania, a man named William Parker is building a network to fight back. When slavecatchers come to his door, that resistance explodes into violence.
How did one law push the country dramatically closer to war? And what happens when the people targeted by this law refuse to surrender?
Special thanks to Dr. Iris Leigh Barnes, director of the Hosanna School Museum; Christy Coleman, public historian and museum executive; Kellie Carter Jackson, chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College; and Jamahl Wimberley, who provided the voice of William Parker.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:03.9 | Just a note before we start, this episode contains depictions of racist language and violence from the era of American slavery. |
| 0:10.9 | These elements are presented in their historical context. |
| 0:16.8 | History this week. April 3, 1851. |
| 0:24.7 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:36.8 | As he moves around the city of Boston, Thomas Sims is on high alert. He arrived here just a few weeks ago. He escaped from slavery down in Georgia. |
| 0:40.4 | He'd been laboring as a bricklayer, forced to hand over all his wages to rice planter and enslaver |
| 0:46.3 | James Potter. But Sims stowed away on a ship and made it here to the north. Massachusetts doesn't have slavery anymore, |
| 0:57.0 | but that doesn't mean that Thomas Sims is safe. Late last summer, in an attempt to keep the country |
| 1:05.1 | from falling into civil war, Congress passed a very controversial law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. |
| 1:14.3 | It was already legal for Southern enslavers to send bounty hunters up north to try to |
| 1:19.6 | kidnap the people who had fled to freedom. |
| 1:21.9 | But many northern states had enacted personal liberty laws to protect these freedom seekers. |
| 1:29.1 | Now, the new federal fugitive slave law tries to make these state laws irrelevant. |
| 1:35.3 | The new law makes it much easier for a black person to be sent south on just a slaveholder's word |
| 1:42.0 | with the help of U.S. Marshals. |
| 1:45.0 | And the law also requires individual northerners to cooperate. |
| 1:50.0 | It's creating a new sense of danger all across the north. |
| 1:54.0 | And today, April 3rd, Thomas Sims is the latest person to be caught. James Potter has gotten wind that Sims is in Boston and had a warrant drawn up for his arrest. |
| 2:06.6 | And now two Boston police officers see him on the street. |
| 2:11.6 | They approach him and try to pull him into a carriage. |
| 2:15.6 | He's got a knife and he resists, but he's overpowered. |
... |
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