Denina was only fifteen years old when her enslaver, Elias Cartwright, a prominent Charleston businessman and deacon at the First Presbyterian Church, forced himself on her for the first time. The assault left her pregnant, and when Cartwright’s wife, Patience, discovered the truth, she issued a chilling ultimatum: Denina had to be sent away, or Patience would ensure the child never survived. Cartwright chose the practical path, arranging to sell Denina at an auction in Savannah, Georgia, far from the reach of his household. At the auction, Denina stood on the block while two men bid against each other.
The first was Thornton Graves, a plantation owner with a reputation for working enslaved people to death, calculating that it was cheaper to extract maximum labor over a few years than to maintain workers for decades. The second bidder was a stranger, a man who introduced himself as Jacob Marsh. When Graves won the bid at ten dollars, a price reflecting Denina’s perceived worth, he ordered her to follow him, but Marsh stopped him, stating he had changed his mind and was keeping her. Graves, furious, threatened him, but Marsh remained calm, noting that Graves should have bid higher.
Later that night, a carriage arrived at the house where Marsh had taken Denina. The driver, a man named William Hadley, who had posed as a bidder to infiltrate the auction, explained the true situation. He told her that Cartwright had sold her not just to be rid of her, but to ensure she would never return to Charleston to cause him embarrassment. Hadley revealed that he was part of the Underground Railroad, a network of free Black people, white abolitionists, and others committed to undermining slavery.
He warned her that her life and her child’s life depended on the next few days, and that he had never lost a person he guided to freedom. Denina was terrified, but she had no choice but to trust him. She had heard of the Underground Railroad, a system of safe houses and secret routes, but she had never imagined she would be its passenger. Hadley explained that Graves would return the next day, and that they had to move that night.
He took her to a wagon, hid her beneath a false floor, and drove through the night toward the coast. The journey was brutal, days of hiding in the cargo hold of a ship, enduring rough seas, cramped quarters, and constant fear of discovery. But Denina endured, remembering the people who had risked everything for her, people who believed the system that enslaved her was evil and worth fighting. After a harrowing voyage, the ship docked in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Denina was taken to the home of Jacob Brennan, a white abolitionist and a key figure in the Underground Railroad.
Brennan, who was seventy years old and had been guiding freedom seekers north for decades, welcomed her with a kindness she had never known from a white person. He told her she was safe, that she would travel north to freedom, and that she was to use the name Ruth, her mother’s name, to avoid detection. Denina stayed with Brennan for several days, resting and gathering strength, before being taken to the home of a free Black family, the Johnsons, who sheltered her until it was safe to move on. Over the following weeks, Denina was passed from one safe house to another, each move coordinated by the Railroad’s network of conductors.
She was transported by wagon, on foot, and by boat, always at night, always in fear. She was given a forged freedom certificate, a document that identified her as a free Black woman from Maryland, and was taught to read and write, skills she had been denied her entire life. She learned that Brennan had been a conductor on the Railroad for over thirty years, and that he had helped hundreds of people escape slavery. She also learned that he was a deeply religious man, who believed that slavery was a sin against God and that he was obligated to fight it with everything he had.
After two months of travel, Denina finally reached Philadelphia, a city with a large free Black community and a hub of abolitionist activity. She was taken to the home of William Still, a prominent Black abolitionist who kept detailed records of the freedom seekers he helped. Still arranged for Denina to travel further north to Canada, where she would be beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act. She crossed the border at Niagara Falls in early April 1852, and for the first time in her life, she was legally free.
She found work as a domestic servant in St. Catharines, Ontario, and eventually married a man named Moses, a formerly enslaved man who had escaped from Kentucky. They had two children, both daughters, and Denina lived the rest of her life in relative peace, a quiet existence built on the courage of strangers and her own stubborn will to live. But Denina never forgot the family she left behind.
Her mother, Patience, remained in Charleston, and Denina knew that her mother would never escape. She also never forgot her daughter, the child she had been forced to sell. When Denina was sixty years old, she learned from a fellow fugitive that her daughter, now a young woman, was still enslaved on the Cartwright plantation. Denina made the impossible decision to return south, to attempt a rescue, knowing full well that she could be recaptured and re-enslaved.
She traveled to Charleston, where she located her daughter, and together they fled north, following the same network of safe houses that had saved Denina decades earlier. They reached Canada in the summer of 1887, and Denina was finally able to hold her daughter in her arms, free. Denina lived until 1891, passing away at the age of sixty-four, a remarkable age for a woman who had endured so much. She died surrounded by her children and grandchildren, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Her story, though extraordinary, is one of millions, the story of a woman who refused to be broken, who fought for her freedom and the freedom of her family, and who, in doing so, became a small but important part of the great movement that would eventually destroy the institution of slavery. The women Thornton Graves murdered were never identified, their names lost to history, but their deaths were not in vain. Their stories, and Denina’s, serve as a reminder of the brutality of slavery and the strength of those who resisted it. Denina’s story is not just a story of suffering, but a story of hope, of the goodness of people like Jacob Brennan and William Still, and of the power of one woman’s determination to be free.
It is a story that must be told, not just to remember the past, but to inspire the future. A historical researcher named Patricia Langley uncovered the truth in 1985, finding Captain Clark’s report and the testimony of witnesses in a sealed archive. She prepared an article for a historical journal, but before it could be published, she was visited by a lawyer representing the Graves family. The lawyer, speaking for Thornton Graves’s descendants, who were prominent citizens of Savannah, threatened legal action if she published her findings.
Patricia, lacking the resources to fight a prolonged legal battle, withdrew the article, but she kept her research, placing it in a sealed envelope with instructions not to be opened until fifty years after her death. In 2031, the envelope was opened, and the truth about the Graves plantation was finally revealed. The report confirmed that Graves purchased at least eight pregnant women between 1843 and 1862, that all of them disappeared while in his possession, and that their remains, along with those of their infants, were discovered in a concealed cellar in 1863. The women’s names, however, were never recorded.
Denina’s story, like the stories of the four million other enslaved people, was nearly lost to history. But it was preserved by the courage of a few and the determination of many. It is a story of evil and of good, of despair and of hope, and it will not be forgotten.