Sara Lucy Bagby
Sara Lucy Bagby 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 was eventually able to escape slavery via the Underground Railroad and made her way to Cleveland, Ohio. In January of 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 returned to Wheeling, Virginia. This episode forms the subject of a poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, titled "To the Cleveland Union-Savers".
After the Emancipation Proclamation, she walked to Pittsburgh, and eventually resettled in Cleveland, where she died and was buried.
