Episode 212: Murder and Manhunt in 1820: Albro’s Flight from Slavery, Part 1

When an enslaved African man named Albro asserted his freedom and fled from the Isle of Palms in 1819, the laws of South Carolina marked him as a criminal fugitive. Spied and then pursued by white men on Dewees Island one night in early 1820, Albro resisted their efforts to capture him and killed one of his assailants. The dramatic story of his flight and the ensuing manhunt and trial, recorded in a series of brief newspaper reports, illuminates a broader cycle of resistance and retribution that forms a large part of Lowcountry history.