A little more than a year ago, I mentioned two projects that told the stories of nine freedom seekers who tried to escape from bound servitude between 1728 and 1864. Historic Annapolis developed the 2011 “Project Run-A-Way” stage production and 2013 “Freedom Bound” museum exhibition to represent a few of the hundreds of enslaved individuals and indentured or convict servants advertised as runaways in 18th- and 19th-century Annapolis newspapers. Their masters wrote descriptive ads in the hope their fugitive human property would be recognized and returned to their custody and service. One of those runaways whose story we first related a decade ago was a young Irishman who made his bid for freedom in 1771. His name was Oliver Stephens.
A musician skilled on both string and woodwind instruments, Stephens paid for his passage to America by selling several years of his labor. He arrived in Annapolis, where Cornelius and Mary Howard, proprietors of the Maryland Coffee-House on upper Church Street (now Main Street), purchased his service contract. Cornelius died in February 1771, leaving his widow to run the business, which catered to an elite clientele, with the help of Stephens and a few other workers.
The living and working conditions of bound laborers in colonial Maryland varied widely. Some enslaved, indentured, and convict servant workers who experienced what might then have been considered relatively easy physical circumstances still resisted the control that others had over their lives. Oliver Stephens’s work as a musician and waiter in Mrs. Howard’s upscale Annapolis establishment certainly wasn’t as arduous as the backbreaking labor done by enslaved field hands, and he was more likely to suffer the sting of social indignities dealt out by the so-called gentlemen he served rather than the cut of a lash. Yet he still felt the need to flee the limits placed on him as an indentured servant.
Whatever prompted the 23-year-old Stephens to make an escape attempt in late July 1771, this was actually his second try for freedom within his first nine months of service. As she stated in the runaway ad printed in the August 1 Maryland Gazette, Mary Howard simply couldn’t fathom why the young Irishman, who she wrote “plays tollerably on a Variety of musical Instruments,” wished to flee what she considered “mild and even genteel Treatment.” She suspected that Stephens was hiding in town or trying to board a ship bound for Philadelphia, a much larger city where he might hope to make a living as a musician. She offered a reward for his return: 5 pounds if he was found more than 10 miles away from Annapolis, or 3 pounds if nearer.
We don’t know if Oliver Stephens succeeded in his 1771 runaway attempt or if he was discovered and returned to the Coffee-House to complete his contracted time. There is, however, one intriguing historical lead: the record of a Private Oliver Stephens who enlisted in the Continental Army’s 3rd Maryland Regiment in 1781, near the end of the Revolutionary War. Did the two-time runaway musician end up fighting for American independence? Maybe! A veteran named Oliver Stephens received a grant of 50 acres of land in what is now Garrett County. Perhaps the former indentured servant built a new life for himself on western land received as a reward for military service to the new United States.
“Freedom Bound: Runaways of the Chesapeake” has been on display in Baltimore at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, but it’s returning to Annapolis! The exhibit developed by Historic Annapolis will be at the Banneker-Douglass Museum from September 2021 to March 2022.
Learn more about “Freedom Bound” at: https://www.lewismuseum.org/freedom-bound/
Read the August 1, 1771 issue of the Maryland Gazette starting here: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001281/html/m1281-1329.html
Glenn E. Campbell
