Jake Ellis -- aka "Allender's Jake", aka William Dixon -- the fugitive slave Douglass encountered on his first day of freedom in New York City, the one who warned him about slave catchers and who was at the center of a years-long legal battle that pulled in underground railroad conductor David Riggles -- was not the property of Dr. Joseph Allender, as Blassimgame et al. suggested in the footnotes to their (excellent) annotated edition of My Bondage, My Freedom.
Period newspaper accounts of Ellis's trip explicitly say Ellis was the property of "Dr. William T. Alexander" of Baltimore. They got the name wrong. This would be William T. Allender (1807-1880), Dr. Alexander's son.
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I'm wondering if you have anymore info on Jake Ellis. I think he was a slave on my family's plantation. My ancestors named Bowerman, two men who married the Allender sisters. The property was northeast of Baltimore and if you Google Map the area you'll see both names on the roads there.
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