The man with the branded hand - Alvin F Oickle

Sailing around the
Florida
Keys in 1844, forty-five-year-old Jonathan Walker had a
price on his head. On board the small boat he had built that winter in
Alabama
were seven fugitives from slavery. The Cape
Cod sailor and
abolitionist was wanted in Pensacola,
Florida,
for his crime:
stealing slaves. The slaves' owners had posted $100 each as
reward
money for their property and $1,000 for Walker's apprehension. Only a
day's sail from their goal of freedom in British-controlled Bahamas,
Walker and
the slaves were stopped and seized by bounty hunters and
taken to a Key West
court. Ordered back to Pensacola for trial, Walker
ended up spending a year in
jail. He was fined and sentenced to stand
in the pillory; in addition, he was
to suffer a unique punishment in
American history: while a packed courtroom
watched, a United States
marshal was ordered to use a hot branding iron to burn
the letters SS,
for "slave stealer," into Walker's right hand.

Walker
survived his ordeal, spending much of his
incarceration in isolation.
Once released, he remained active in the
antislavery movement even
while he and his devoted wife Jane raised their nine
children. His
attempt to help form a new colony in Mexico for runaway American
slaves
also led to punishing experiences for Walker and one of his sons.
Living
later with his family in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the years
before the Civil
War, Walker made room in his crowded house to shelter
runaway slaves along the
Underground Railroad. He participated in
abolitionist lecture tours across the
North where he would be urged to
reveal his branded hand-made famous by John
Greenleaf Whittier's poem
"The Branded Hand"-to astonished audiences. Too old
to enlist in the
Civil War, Walker instead headed to Virginia in the war's
final year to
help educate African Americans fleeing Confederate forces. In The
Man With the Branded Hand: The Life of Jonathan Walker, Abolitionist,
distinguished journalist Alvin F. Oickle relates this entire
remarkable story
of a life devoted to the supposition that "all men are
created equal."