Jeff Green Seeks info on African American Fugitive 1850s

Contributed Email from Historian Jeffrey Green

African American Fugitive

My latest entry on my website (put  Jeffrey Green Historian  into your search engine) is page 107 and concerns fugitive slave John Anderson who killed a man in Missouri in 1853 en route to freedom in Canada. In 1860-1861 the legal arguments over extradition attracted a lot of attention and in mid-1861 Anderson came to England. He stayed until late 1862, moving on to Liberia. A small biography was published in London in 1863.

He went to the nonconformist village school in the then-village of Corby, Northamptonshire (it has under 200 houses in the 1860s) for a year, taught by John Pool and his wife Ann or Anna. John Pool accompanied Anderson on the train from London to catch his steamship in Liverpool in late 1862.

Does anyone know anything about the Hampshire-born Pools? The census of 1861 shows they had an 8 year old daughter (Alice Olivia) and a 7 year old son (William Henry). These two teachers, their children, the village children, or local adults may have commented years later that a 30 year old black American, accused of murder, studied in Corby in 1861-1862.

Assistance would be appreciated as I am contacted to wrote Anderson’s entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Jeff Green