I moved to Baltimore with my family in 1983 to start work as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, A decade or so later, when I thought I knew the city and its history pretty well, I was shocked to see a reference to the slave trade that had thrived at the Inner Harbor for more than half a century before the Civil War. I found then — and still find today — that most Baltimoreans and most Americans have little idea of what the domestic slave trade was: the forced transport of about 1 million enslaved African Americans from the upper south, particularly the Chesapeake region, to the deep south, where the cotton and sugar plantations had an insatiable demand for labor. For many captives, sale south — usually through a slave trader like those around Baltimore’s harbor — was a terrible fate, separating them forever from parents, siblings, spouse and children. So I wrote about this phenomenon for The Sun and have always wanted to return to the story.

I went on to work for The New York Times for 15 years, writing about the spy agencies, terrorism and national security. When I retired from the Times at the end of 2019, I returned to the history of slavery, looking for a true story to tell. The victims of the domestic slave trade were largely illiterate, and the slave traders were hardly writers. So I enlarged my hunt through books and archives and came across the abolitionist Charles Torrey, who had died in a Baltimore prison, and his partner, the Washington shoemaker Thomas Smallwood. The more I learned about Smallwood, the more I was shocked that he was so little known. From a Boston Public Library warehouse, I was able to recover his satirical newspaper columns, a unique work of literature and history. When I discovered that Smallwood had conceived and named the mythical “underground railroad” on which people were escaping slavery, he became the center of my tale. I also learned how flight north was fueled by the constant fear of sale south. So by adding the Baltimore slave trader Hope Slatter, mortal enemy of Smallwood and Torrey, as the third major character, I returned to my long-ago hope of making the domestic slave trade better understood.

Though I am by no means a professional historian, it’s been gratifying to turn some of the skills I acquired in 40 years as a journalist, including many adventures at home and overseas and two Pulitzer Prizes shared with colleagues, to unearthing stories from the 19th century. The differences between writing news and writing history are huge — I could not ask Thomas Smallwood for an interview or lurk near Hope Slatter’s slave jail. But the quest for documents, the sorting out of contradictory versions of events, the challenge of finding real characters and events to tell a larger story — all that felt familiar. I feel very fortunate to be able to play a small role in giving Thomas Smallwood the place in history he deserves, and in helping Americans understand our past, including its darkest chapters.