Sara Lucy Bagby facts for kids

Sara Lucy Bagby (1843 – July 14, 1906) was the last person in the United States forced to return to slavery in the South under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Born in the early 1840s in Virginia, she eventually escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad and made her way to Cleveland, Ohio, in a free state. In January 1861, she was pursued by her owners, William Goshorn and his son, and arrested by a U.S. Marshall.

Despite the state government's and citizens of Cleveland's attempts to intervene—including a purported dramatic armed standoff in a courtroom—she was transported back to Goshorn's property in Wheeling, then still part of Virginia. This episode forms the subject of a poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, titled "To the Cleveland Union-Savers".

After the Emancipation Proclamation, Bagby walked to Pittsburgh to leave the South. She eventually resettled in Cleveland, where she died in 1906 and was buried.

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In Spanish: Sara Lucy Bagby para niños