As part of the first group of slaves freed by the Underground Railroad, James A. Bowley continued his family’s legacy of standing up for fellow African Americans. Bowley became revered as an educator and politician who fought for the rights of freed slaves during the Reconstruction Era in the post-Civil War South.
Bowley was born in Maryland in 1844 to Kessiah Bowley, who was Harriet Tubman’s niece. Kessiah and Harriet were so close in age that they considered themselves sisters. Bowley’s father, John, was manumitted by his owner in the 1840s and worked as a blacksmith and shipbuilder.
Bowley, his mother, and sister Araminta were owned by Eliza Brodess, the same slave owner Harriet Tubman had escaped from in the late 1840s. Sometime in 1850, Tubman would learn that her niece and her niece’s two children would be put up for auction in December of that year.
Fearing for the fate of her niece’s family, Tubman quickly formulated a plan to free them. She worked with Bowley’s father to figure out a way to get the family out of slave custody.
Since John Bowley was free, he went to the auction and was able to snag the highest bid for his wife and two children, without anyone knowing who the bidder was. In fact, by the time the officials in Dorchester County figured out who had placed the bid for Bowley’s family, they were already hiding out in a nearby safe house.
The Bowleys then jumped on a small boat to Baltimore where they reunited with Tubman and then later fled to Philadelphia. But now that they were free, the family worried that they would be caught due to the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Act that allowed escaped slaves in free states to be returned to their owners in the South.
Republican During Reconstruction
Tubman worked hard to pay for Bowley’s education, which he used to continue his family’s effort to help those freed from slavery. After serving in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, Bowley relocated to Georgetown, South Carolina to follow his dreams of making a difference.While in South Carolina, Bowley helped newly freed slaves by working as a teacher for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgetown, where he eventually earned the title of school commissioner. In 1869 during the Reconstruction Era, Bowley was elected to the state House of Representatives during a special election.
While serving in the South Carolina legislature, he worked towards establishing the Union Savings Bank of Georgetown, to help provide a safe place for emancipated slaves to deposit money and get financial advice.
However, shortly into his career as a lawmaker, Bowley got caught up in the tense political climate of the time. After a disagreement with a fellow Republican ended in a brutal gunfight, the Southern Democratic leaders and newspapers used the incident to discredit politicians in the opposing party.
In an effort to fight back when he was greatly outnumbered, Bowley started his own Republican-leaning newspaper in 1873, coined “The Georgetown Planet.” The sole Republican-oriented newspaper in Georgetown promised its readers the publication would ”advocate … to every citizen liberty, equal rights [and] justice before the law,” according to the National Park Service.
When his political career came to an end while he was in his mid-30s, Bowley focused his attention on educating freed slaves. In 1873, he was named a trustee of the University of South Carolina during the brief period when it was integrated.
Bowley worked as a teacher for several more years before he passed away in 1891. In 2009, Bowley’s former home in Georgetown was designated as a “nationally registered site of importance” in the history of African Americans in South Carolina.
