THE LAST RETURNED FUGITIVE SLAVE

Until the eve of the Civil War, escaped slaves were still returned to their Southern masters under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In 1860, Sara Lucy Bagby Johnson age 18-years-old, escaped from West Virginia, and made her way to Cleveland through the Underground Railroad. Bagby found work as a domestic servant for A. G. Riddle, a Republican Congressman-elect, who would later serve as a member of her defense council. Police officers abducted her from the home of her employer in 1861, under the Fugitive Slave Act, and returned her to her former owner William Goshorn who had followed her to Cleveland. Although sympathetic to her cause a federal judge ruled that "the law was the law" and returned her to her former master who was unwilling to accept compensation for her freedom. 

When the Civil War began, her determined master moved her further down south to Virginia in an attempt to maintain ownership. When Union forces took control of northwestern Virginia in June 1861, she was freed and her former master jailed. Bagby returned to Ohio, and abolition leaders in Cleveland held a Grand Jubilee for her on the 6th May 1863. She married a former Union soldier, F. George Johnson, and lived in Pittsburgh until returning to Cleveland where they remained until her death in 1906.