Drayton, Daniel

Life Span
    Full name
    Daniel Drayton
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Estimated
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Origins
    Free State
    Occupation
    Other
    Other Occupation
    Merchant seaman
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Methodist
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)

    Daniel Drayton (Bordewich, 2006)

    Scholarship
    Drayton was of a rougher cut, with a large cleft chin, gloomy eyes, and brows that knotted over the bridge of his nose: it was a sad face, wrinkled and scored by more than two decades at sea. Strictly speaking, he was not an underground man, at least not in the way that [William] Chaplin was. He was a Philadelphia ship’s captain who desperately needed money. What [Chaplin and Drayton]  were planning was the biggest organized break-out of slaves in underground history thus far….Drayton’s life was one hard-luck story. He was born in poverty, in 1802, in New Jersey, not far from the mouth of the Delaware River. Taking to sea as a cook at the age of nineteen, after several miserable years in a sloop working the mid-Atlantic coast. On its second voyage, the sloop struck a snag near the mouth of the Susquehanna and sank in five minutes, its uninsured cargo a total loss. His next vessel sank off North Carolina with a cargo of coal and several of its crew. Another was blown ashore on Long Island, with a hundred tons of plaster. Still another was lost in a freak snowstorm, in Chesapeake Bay.
    Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York: Amistad, 2006), 295-296.
    Chicago Style Entry Link
    Drayton, Daniel. Personal Memoir of Daniel Drayton. Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855. view record
    How to Cite This Page: "Drayton, Daniel," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5589.