Buried in Chains

Throughout Pickard’s account, Seth Concklin strives to free the Stills with selfless and often heroic energy. As his interrogators put it, “would you be such a fool as to be carried back in irons, and lose your life for the sake of saving other people?” His refusal to give up his aboliition network was answer enough. However, as the party began to travel southward, Concklin appears to have dwelt on his almost certain conviction in the courts of Alabama, where his emancipatory actions would have constituted the penalty of death. The night before their ship, the Paul Anderson arrived in Paducah, the Stills received news that Concklin had gone. Although his disappearance remained shrouded in mystery, extant accounts suggest that he had made a desparate bid to escape. 

During the night, Concklin attempted to escape to the steamer Mohican, which was anchored near the Paul Anderson, but under the weight of his manacles, he drowned in the Ohio River near the town of Smithland. As Pickard writes,

Although he was buried as he was found, in chains, and was branded with the name of ‘negro thief,’ and his captors exulted in their blood-stained rewards, yet in the sight of Truth and of Heaven, he is joined to the noble and heroic company of the martyrs, the martyrs of Freedom and Humanity. (409)

While Pickard’s epitaph acknowledges the tremendous, selfless efforts that Concklin made on behalf of the Stills, the words of the enslaver James M. Emison, who apprehended the Stills, illuminates the intwined themes of constraint and movement in the family’s story. 

In remembrance, Emison explains that “[Concklin’s] dead and buried–he’s gone to–with his manacles on, so you’ll know him when he comes up in the resurrection.” Emison implies that Concklin had assumed the identity of the imprisoned at a more fundamental level, such that his sacrifice would endure materially even into resurrection. In life, Seth Concklin had embraced the risks and costs of abolitionism, although he still clung to the prerogatives of liberty afforded to white men. He drowned between two ships.