The Master Forger — How One Enslaved Man Created Freedom Papers for 100 People, 1858 1863 | HO!!!!

PART 1 – The Night the Workshop Doors Blew Open

On paper, Willowbrook Plantation in Fauquier County, Virginia, was an orderly world.

The ledgers show 2,300 acres of Piedmont soil, tobacco and cotton carefully tallied, 87 enslaved people listed as “assets,” a three–story white mansion with magnolia trees and a perfect view down to the Rapidan River. The man who owned it all, 43-year-old Master Nathaniel Blackwood, was the kind of Virginia planter who liked to see himself as civilized, educated, and benevolent.

The records say he gave his enslaved workers shoes twice a year. He liked to quote Aristotle on “natural slavery.” He sat on the county bench, went to the Episcopal church, and never personally wielded a whip. That was what overseers were for.

But the records leave something out.

For five years, from 1858 to 1863, while Blackwood and his neighbors argued politics over bourbon and cigars, somebody on that plantation was quietly attacking the foundations of slavery with nothing more than paper, ink, and a stolen education.

That secret exploded into public view on the night of April 15, 1863.

At 3:00 a.m., according to the sheriff’s log, seven mounted men rode up the lane to Willowbrook: Sheriff William Garrett, two deputies, three local patrollers, and a “confidential informant” from North Carolina—a man now identified in surviving testimony as Tobias Grant, an enslaved spy working for a network of slave catchers.

They did not go to the big house.

They went straight to a low wooden building beside the stables: the carpentry and clock workshop.

What they found inside would send shockwaves through Virginia’s planter class, trigger a sensational trial, draw a personal letter from President Abraham Lincoln, and turn an enslaved repairman named Isaac Coleman into one of the most feared—and celebrated—criminals in Southern history.

Sheriff Garrett’s inventory from that raid still exists in the Fauquier County archive. Item by item, it reads like an indictment of the entire slave system:

112 sets of completed manumission papers bearing seals from Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
Multiple steel and brass seal stamps, hand-cut to imitate official county dies.
Bottles of iron gall ink, quills, magnifying lenses, and fine knives.
A hidden compartment carved into the underside of the workbench, containing extra seals and blank paper.
And one leather-bound ledger filled with names, dates, physical descriptions, destinations—and a chilling note at the top of the first page in a neat, careful hand:
“For every chain broken. Remember them.”

Within hours, white Fauquier County was calling him “the Devil’s Forger.”

Within days, enslaved people across the region had another name for him—one they whispered with awe and defiance:

“The Paper Angel.”

Our investigation reconstructs the life and operation of Isaac Coleman from court transcripts, abolitionist pamphlets, newspaper reports, and the memoir he published after the Civil War. What emerges is a story that reads like fiction but is rooted in the hard, ugly mechanics of American slavery—a system so obsessed with documents and property that it was ultimately vulnerable to a man with perfect memory, steady hands, and nothing left to lose.

And it did not begin with that raid. To understand how one enslaved man forged freedom papers for at least 100 people between 1858 and 1863, we have to go back five years, to the day he first arrived at Willowbrook in chains.

“Extraordinary Eyes”

The bill of sale for Isaac lists him the way antebellum paperwork always does:

“Male negro, name Isaac, approximately 27 years of age, no visible infirmity, skilled carpentry, price $750.”

But witnesses remember something the paper could not capture.

“They talked about his eyes,” says one historian who has spent years combing through the Coleman case. “Even white observers who testified against him mention them. Dark, intense, always watching.”

On a suffocating August afternoon in 1858, a trader’s wagon rolled through Willowbrook’s iron gates carrying Isaac and eleven other enslaved people. Their wrists were shackled, ankles chained, skin rubbed raw from transport. They were put on display on the front lawn while buyers—planters like Blackwood—prodded muscles, pried open mouths, calculated years of labor like livestock traders.

To Nathaniel Blackwood, Isaac must have seemed like a prize: strong shoulders, no obvious injuries, a record of work as a carpenter’s assistant in Maryland. The trader, a sweaty man named Peyton who reeked of stale whiskey, sweetened the pitch: “Smart, too, master. Too smart, some say—but trainable. Never been whipped, far as I know.”

Blackwood haggled the price down to $750 and had Isaac marched straight to the carpentry workshop. There he placed him under the supervision of an aging German craftsman, Hinrich Weber, who’d been hired to train Blackwood’s enslaved carpenters.

It was a decision Blackwood would later call “the greatest mistake of my life.”

At the time, it looked like nothing more than smart management: put a skilled slave under a skilled European artisan and get better furniture, better wagons, better tools. What Blackwood did not know—and what the trial would later expose—was that Isaac Coleman did not arrive at Willowbrook as a blank slate.

He brought with him a hidden arsenal.

A Childhood Built on Words

Isaac was born in Baltimore in 1831. His parents, Grace and Samuel, were legally enslaved but “hired out” by their owner, a lawyer who collected their wages while allowing them unusual freedom of movement. Grace worked as a seamstress for white families. Samuel worked as a printer’s assistant in a newspaper office.

Both could read and write—an illegal, dangerous skill for Black people in states that depended on slavery. They gained it through a clandestine school run by free Blacks in Fells Point. And they did something even more dangerous:

They taught their son.

For the first nine years of his life, Isaac lived in a strange limbo: legally property, functionally semi-free. He slept in his parents’ rented room instead of a slave cabin. He attended secret lessons, learned letters and numbers, watched his father set type and run the press.

From the testimony he later gave to abolitionists, one memory stands out: standing in that print shop, small hands stained with ink, watching his father hold up a legal document and explain how a piece of paper could determine whether a person was considered property or free.

That fragile world shattered in 1840.

When the lawyer who owned the family died, his estate was liquidated. Grace, Samuel, and nine-year-old Isaac were sold at auction and scattered to different buyers. Isaac never saw his parents again.

Through the grapevine—the informal communication network among enslaved people—he later learned that his father had been sent to South Carolina and died of cholera within two years. His mother’s fate remains unknown.

Isaac spent the next 18 years being sold six times across Maryland and Virginia, working wherever his owners needed labor: stables, fields, kitchens, workshops. Every sale treated him as a commodity. Every new plantation taught him fresh layers of cruelty.

At 15, he watched a pregnant woman whipped until she miscarried. At 19, he saw a man branded with a hot iron for trying to escape. At 23, he held the hand of a dying child whose back wounds had festered with infection.

Through it all, he protected one secret: he could read, write, and remember.

Fear kept him from flaunting it. After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, Virginia had tightened laws, making literacy among enslaved people grounds for brutal punishment or death.

Instead, Isaac turned his mind into a vault.

He memorized documents whenever he could glimpse them. He practiced letters in charcoal on scraps of paper. He developed a rare skill: the ability to look at a document once and reproduce it later with remarkable precision.

For years, it was nothing more than a private obsession—a way to feel some control. Only when he reached Willowbrook would that obsession become a weapon.

The Clock That Started a War

The turning point comes in March 1859, just seven months after Isaac arrives at Willowbrook.

One day, Blackwood walks into the workshop with a broken pocket watch: a Swiss chronometer inherited from his father. It has been dead for months. No jeweler in the county has managed to fix it.

Hinrich Weber, the German craftsman, is about to decline when Isaac speaks up quietly:

“May I examine it, master?”

It is a calculated risk. Giving a slave access to such a valuable heirloom is unusual. But curiosity—and planter pride—wins out. Blackwood hands him the watch.

The workshop accounts and Blackwood’s own testimony agree on what happens next:

Isaac opens the casing with a tiny screwdriver, studies the mechanism for less than a minute, uses tweezers to adjust a single bent spring, winds the watch, and hands it back.

It ticks perfectly.

The repair takes 90 seconds.

“Where did you learn this?” Blackwood demands.

“Just observation, master,” Isaac answers, eyes lowered in the posture of submission. “Watched a watchmaker in Baltimore when I was young. Remembered what I saw.”

That half-truth changes everything.

From that day, Isaac becomes Blackwood’s trusted repairman for all “delicate mechanical work”—clocks, watches, music boxes, locks. He is given a private corner of the workshop, better light, fine tools, magnifying lenses. Crucially, White supervision becomes looser. Hours pass with no one watching his hands.

To Blackwood, this is efficient management of a valuable asset.

To Isaac, it is an opening.

While he oils gears and resets escapements, legal documents drift through the workshop—contracts, deeds, letters. Blackwood sets them down while checking on work. Visitors hand them over for signature or review.

Isaac’s eyes photograph them.

At night, back in his cabin, he pulls out hidden scraps of paper and reproduces what he saw from memory: county letterheads, legal phrasing, signatures of judges, embossing patterns on seals. He experiments with homemade ink made from berries before eventually finding a more convincing formula based on oak galls, iron filings, vinegar, and gum arabic traded from a sympathetic free Black merchant.

On Sundays, when enslaved people are forced to attend the white Episcopal service and then allowed a few hours of their own worship, he makes excuses to be nearby whenever free Blacks or traders present their papers—those precious documents that prove legal freedom.

One encounter in July 1859 changes his trajectory.

A free man named Joshua Washington arrives with a wagon of lumber. Blackwood demands to see his papers. Joshua hands over his manumission document. Blackwood scans it and hands it back.

Isaac, standing fifteen feet away holding a broken clock, sees everything: the exact wording (“Know all men by these presents…”), the judge’s name, the witnesses, the county seal.

That night, by candlelight, he recreates it line by line in his cabin.

It is, by his own account, “the first time I looked at a piece of paper and knew it could be a key instead of a chain.”

He does not act on that realization immediately. For more than a year, he studies—collecting seal designs from different counties, learning which judges sign which documents, understanding how manumission petitions work.

Then, in October 1860, the abstract becomes personal.

The First Escape

The plantation records contain no entry about conscience. They record only numbers.

In the fall of 1860, Blackwood faces gambling debts. To raise cash, he decides to sell an enslaved field hand named Benjamin “south”—into the deep cotton country of Mississippi.

Benjamin has done nothing wrong. He has a wife at Willowbrook, a woman named Delia, and two young sons. None of that matters. A human being is converted into cash and marched off in a coffle.

Isaac watches the family cling to each other the night before the sale, begging, weeping, knowing they have no legal standing, that their marriage does not exist under Virginia law.

He has seen this many times. This time, something breaks—and then hardens—inside him.

Three days after Benjamin is shipped out in chains, Isaac sits down in his cabin with a stolen board across his lap as a makeshift desk and forges his first freedom paper.

He writes in a clear, formal hand:

Know all men by these presents that I, Robert Harrison of Loudoun County, Virginia, do hereby manumit and set free my negro woman Delia…

He invents a benevolent owner. He invents witnesses. He adds a precise county seal copied from memory. He works for six hours by candlelight.

When he examines the finished paper under a jeweler’s lens, he cannot tell it from Joshua Washington’s real manumission.

The document is perfect.

Using it is not.

Approaching Delia at the washing creek, he unfolds the paper and explains bluntly: She can walk away from Willowbrook. If patrollers stop her, she shows the document. From there, he tells her how to reach a safe house run by Quakers roughly fifteen miles north—a location he knows only through whispered rumors in the enslaved grapevine.

She stares at the paper, then at him.

“You’re asking me to leave my boys,” she says.

“I’m asking you to live,” he answers. “And when you’re free, you can work, save money, maybe buy them. Here, Master can sell them tomorrow, and there’s nothing you can do.”

It is an impossible choice. There is no version of slavery in which her family is safe.

Three nights later, under a moonless sky, Delia walks off Willowbrook carrying a bundle of clothes, a chunk of cornbread, and a sheet of forged paper.

For two weeks, Isaac lives in dread.

If she is caught and the paper discovered, torture will follow. If she breaks under pain and gives his name, it is over.

Then, one afternoon, a free Black peddler arrives at Willowbrook with needles and thread. He steps into the workshop, admires Isaac’s work, waits for the German craftsman to turn his back, and whispers two words:

“She’s safe.”

To Isaac, it is like a fuse being lit.

If one forged paper can carry one woman to freedom, what about ten? What about fifty? What about a hundred?

Within three years, according to his own ledger and prosecution estimates, the number will stand at 112.

Public memory, simplified over time, rounds it down.

Most records—and the title of this investigation—settle on a stark phrase:

“The Master Forger who gave freedom papers to a hundred souls.”

The truth is, the count may be even higher.

Either way, the war Isaac is about to wage will terrify every slaveholder from Fauquier County to Richmond.

And he will not fight it alone.

PART 2 – Building a Underground Operation Inside a Plantation

By the spring of 1861, when the nation itself is splitting apart, Isaac Coleman has already engineered at least eighteen escapes.

On the surface, life at Willowbrook looks unchanged.

The bell still rings at 5 a.m. Enslaved workers still file into fields and workshops. Overseer Seamus O’Malley still rides the rows with a whip and a cold eye. Old preacher Jeremiah still leads Sunday services in the quarters, reminding his people that they are more than property.

In the big house, politics dominates the dinner table. Nathaniel Blackwood and his guests argue secession and states’ rights while enslaved servants refill glasses and silently listen to white men debate whether they should go to war to keep owning Black bodies.

In the quarters, rumors swirl: Lincoln’s election, South Carolina’s secession, talk of a coming war. For some, war sounds like hope. For others, it sounds like a prelude to being sold south in a last-ditch cash grab.

In the carpentry shop, something much more precise is happening.

“The Clockmaker Can Fix What’s Broken”

By this point, Isaac is running what can only be described as a clandestine document factory under the nose of a man who prides himself on control.

He has rules.

He won’t forge papers for anyone who doesn’t have a plan beyond the document: contacts along the Underground Railroad, a destination, a route north. He asks for details—age, complexion, scars, county of origin—so the manumission will seem plausible if questioned.

He varies the types of documents he creates:

For young, healthy enslaved adults, he writes standard manumissions from supposedly benevolent owners.
For older or infirm people, he drafts “reward for faithful service” manumissions—more believable to suspicious officials.
For light-skinned men and women who can pass as free-born, he occasionally forges completely different papers, claiming they have always been free.

To avoid detection, he never hands a document directly to a recipient. Instead, he hides completed papers in pre-arranged spots: a hollow tree by the creek, under a loose stone by the tobacco barn, in a broken fence post. Intermediaries spread the word quietly.

His reputation spreads even faster.

In the encrypted language of the slave quarters, messages travel from plantation to plantation:

“The clockmaker at Willowbrook can fix more than clocks.”

Field hands loaned out during harvests carry requests. Visiting Black preachers bring names. Free Black washer women who service the big houses become information brokers, passing notes and gossip between enslaved communities and Northern abolitionist networks.

Demand quickly outstrips Isaac’s ability to supply.

He works late into the night, every night, until exhaustion presses at the edges of his vision. A single mis-shaped letter could mean a noose, not just for him, but for whoever carries that paper. Still, the ledger grows:

Dozens of names. Destinations like Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Canada.

And then, in June 1861, a new entry appears, one that changes his operation forever:

Hannah Brown.

The Seamstress in the Big House

When Hannah arrives at Willowbrook, she is 26 years old, a trained seamstress sold from a failing plantation in Caroline County.

Plantation lore describes her as “quiet, serious, not prone to laughter.” The records do not mention the child sold from her arms three years earlier—a daughter taken at five years old to cover her previous owner’s debts. By the time she reaches Willowbrook, that wound has hardened into something closer to steel.

Blackwood assigns her to the big house to mend clothing and sew dresses for his wife, Constance, a woman known among the enslaved for her jealous cruelty. It is miserable work—but it gives Hannah access to something rare: paper.

Letters, contracts, legal notices circulate constantly through the master’s study and parlor. Working a few feet away with her needle and thread, Hannah sees what no field hand ever would: signatures, letterheads, seals.

On Sundays, she attends the same segregated church service as the rest of Willowbrook’s enslaved people, then drifts toward the same creek bank where Isaac often sits apart from the crowd.

He notices her first because of how she carries herself: upright, unbroken, eyes clear despite everything she has lost.

They talk about small things at first—previous plantations, mutual acquaintances, the harshness of O’Malley’s punishments. Then the conversation deepens.

Isaac admits, cautiously, that he once learned his letters in Baltimore.

“So you can read,” Hannah asks, glancing around to be sure no one hears.

“Can you?” he counters.

She nods.

The shock of that shared secret—two literate enslaved people in a world where literacy is contraband—binds them almost instantly.

Over the following months, they build a relationship in stolen minutes: Hannah brings mending to the workshop as an excuse to linger. They meet by the creek on Sunday afternoons. They trade stories of the mothers they lost, the children they will likely never see again.

“I had promised myself never to love anybody in this system,” Isaac later writes. “Love was leverage for masters. But she was…impossible to resist.”

Then, one freezing Sunday in November 1861, he makes a decision that will test that love to the limit.

He tells her everything.

Partners in Crime

Sitting by the creek as ice crusts at the water’s edge, Isaac lays out the operation in detail: the forged papers, the seal stamps, the safe houses, the ledger, the 18 people already gone.

Hannah listens without interruption. When he finishes, she does not react with fear or outrage.

“I want to help,” she says.

“No.” His response is immediate. “If they catch me, that’s one man. If they catch you…”

“I can write,” she cuts in. “My hand is steadier than yours. I see papers all day in the house—new signatures, new seals, the latest legal language. We can make better documents together. Faster. Smarter. You can’t do this alone forever.”

Isaac understands the terror of involving someone he loves in a capital crime.

He also understands the cold math: two skilled forgers with access to different worlds—the workshop and the big house—can help more people escape, and help them more safely.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“I lost my child to this evil,” she says. “If I can stop even one mother from feeling what I felt, I’ll risk anything.”

From that moment, the “Devil’s Forger” is no longer a solitary figure at a workbench.

He’s one half of a team.

Hannah takes over a large part of the penwork. Her script is smooth, elegant, almost decorative—perfect for mimicking the formal hand of county clerks and lawyers. She begins smuggling information out of the master’s study: which judges in neighboring counties are stricter, which lawyers specialize in manumissions, what new ordinances local courts have passed.

Their documents become even more convincing. They start including up-to-date legal references, the names of actual attorneys, fine variations in language that only someone inside the system would know.

Distribution grows more sophisticated as well. Hannah uses free Black washer women who service Willowbrook and neighboring estates to link up with Underground Railroad “conductors” further north. Instead of relying on chance peddlers, they now have a semi-regular pipeline: names and requests come down; finished papers go up.

By the spring of 1862, they have helped at least 43 people escape.

The couple themselves talk quietly, cautiously, about running together one day. But both know the risk: the more central they’ve become to a growing network, the harder it is to simply disappear.

“We thought we were being careful,” Isaac would later admit. “We never once considered that the system might send a spy.”

The Spy in the Quarters

In February 1863, Willowbrook acquires a new enslaved man: a 42-year-old field hand named Tobias Grant, purchased from North Carolina.

To the community, he appears as many newcomers do: quiet, observant, eager not to cause trouble.

What no one at Willowbrook knows is that Tobias is already on someone else’s payroll.

For months, slave catchers across Virginia and North Carolina have been alarmed by a pattern: an unusually high number of escapes originating from plantations in and around Fauquier County, many involving people carrying what appear to be impeccable freedom papers.

Someone, they conclude, is forging documents good enough to fool patrols and courthouse clerks.

They decide to fight forgery with infiltration.

Tobias strikes a deal: he will be placed at a suspected “hot” plantation, observe quietly, and report back when he identifies the source. In exchange, he is promised his own freedom and a reward of $200—a fortune for a Black man in bondage.

For six weeks, he watches.

He notices that people from neighboring plantations often find reasons to talk to Isaac—for a sharpened tool, a repaired handle, a “favor.”

He notices that Hannah’s trips to the carpentry shop are more frequent than seem necessary for simple furniture questions.

He notices that certain individuals who have spoken with them are suddenly gone—not sold, not dead, just “gone.”

In early April, he slips away at night and walks five miles to Sheriff Garrett’s house.

Under oath later, Sheriff Garrett recalls what Grant told him:

“I think I’ve found him. The one who fixes more than clocks.”

Five days later, the workshop doors blow open at 3:00 a.m., and everything Isaac and Hannah have built for five years is laid out on a table, tagged and numbered by white hands.

The forged papers. The tools. The hidden seals.

And the ledger—a detailed, meticulous record of 112 escapes.

From an investigator’s standpoint, it is gold.

From Isaac’s, it is a hanging rope in book form.

“It was the one truly stupid thing I did,” he would later admit. “I kept those names partly for logistics, partly so they would not be forgotten. The system used paper to own us. I wanted paper to remember our freedom.”

The system will now use that paper against him.

PART 3 – Trial of “The Paper Angel”

By May 4, 1863, the case of Commonwealth of Virginia v. Isaac and Hannah, negroes has become the talk of Richmond and beyond.

Newspapers frame it in stark terms:

“Massive Forgery Ring Uncovered in Fauquier County—Over 100 Slaves Stolen by Counterfeit Papers.”
“The Devil’s Forger at Last in Chains.”

What the headlines do not say—but every white planter understands—is the deeper fear:

If one enslaved man and one enslaved woman can undermine the documentary foundations of slavery from inside a single plantation, how many others might be doing the same?

The courthouse in Warrenton, a Greek Revival building with tall white columns, is packed beyond capacity when the trial opens.

In the front rows sit plantation owners, slave traders, and county officials concerned about “property rights.” In the back, allowed in grudgingly, are free Blacks and a handful of enslaved people granted permission to attend. Among them is old Jeremiah, Willowbrook’s preacher, 81 years old and leaning on a cane.

In the third row sits a man who does not belong to either world: a Quaker abolitionist from Philadelphia named Eli Morrison.

His notebook is open.

He has been visiting Isaac in jail for weeks, recording his story, and has already rushed a pamphlet into print in the North under the title “The Paper Angel: The True Account of Isaac Coleman and His War Against Slavery.”

By the time the trial opens, thousands of abolitionists in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston already know the name of an enslaved man who forged freedom papers in Virginia. What happens in this small courthouse will not stay local.

“I Forged Those Papers”

Because Virginia law does not grant enslaved people the right to legal counsel, Isaac and Hannah stand alone in the defendants’ dock, shackled to iron rings bolted into the floor.

The prosecution is straightforward.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Douglas Whitfield calls:

Nathaniel Blackwood, who testifies about Isaac’s “betrayal of his master’s benevolence,” turning trust into treason.
Sheriff Garrett, who details the raid, the hidden seals, and the “incriminating ledger.”
Tobias Grant, who explains his undercover observations in the quarters, describing “whispered conferences” and a correlation between contact with the accused and subsequent escapes.
A handwriting expert from Richmond, who spends an hour parsing genuine and forged signatures and concludes that a single skilled hand—or pair of hands—produced “documents of alarming sophistication.”

The evidence is overwhelming.

By 2 p.m., Whitfield rests his case. The judges—five white slave-owning men, led by Cornelius Peyton—look almost bored. Conviction is a foregone conclusion. Under Virginia law, forging manumission papers is a capital offense.

Then the presiding judge turns to the dock.

“The accused may speak in their own defense,” he says. “Fifteen minutes each. Isaac, you first.”

At this point, Isaac could do what the system expects of him: deny, grovel, blame others, beg for mercy.

Instead, he does something that will echo far beyond that room.

He stands as tall as his shackles allow, looks directly at the panel of judges, then turns so his voice carries to the whole courtroom.

“I will not insult this court by claiming innocence,” he begins. “Everything the prosecutor said is true.”

A murmur ripples through the room.

“I forged those documents,” he continues. “I made those seals. I kept that ledger. I helped 112 human beings escape from slavery. And I am not sorry. Not even a little.”

It is, in effect, a confession.

It is also a declaration of war.

He does not stop there.

“You call what I did theft,” he says, “but how can I steal what was never property to begin with?”

He paints a picture of his life: born in Baltimore in 1831, taught to read and write by enslaved parents, torn from them at age nine, sold six times in 18 years.

He describes a pregnant woman whipped until she loses her child, a man branded for running, a boy dying from infected lash wounds.

“This is the system you are defending,” he tells the judges. “One that rips children from mothers and calls it commerce.”

He explains how he learned that paper could be a “key instead of a chain,” how he used that knowledge to keep families together where the law tore them apart.

“I know you will convict me,” he says at one point. “But understand something: I am not a criminal. I am a soldier.”

The phrase lands like a blow.

“Every enslaved person who resists,” he goes on—“by running away, working slow, breaking tools, poisoning a master, or forging papers—we are all soldiers in a war. A war against a system so evil it calls human beings property.”

Plantation owners in the audience are visibly enraged. Judge Peyton’s jaw tightens. In the back row, Eli Morrison writes so fast his pen scratches.

Isaac doesn’t ask for mercy.

“I stand here as a free man in spirit, if not in law,” he says. “If you hang me, I will die knowing I did more good in five years of forgery than most men do in a lifetime of obeying your unjust laws. One hundred and twelve people are free because of what Hannah and I did. You cannot take that away.”

When he sits down, the courtroom erupts—some shouting for his immediate execution, some crying openly. One voice in the back can be heard saying, “God bless you.”

Next, Hannah stands.

She is shaking. Her voice trembles. But she does not disavow him.

“Everything we did, we did together,” she says. “Don’t let anyone tell you he corrupted me. I chose this.”

She talks about the daughter sold away from her at five years old, about wanting to die, about how forging papers for other mothers gave her a reason to live.

“You talk about property rights,” she says, looking straight at Blackwood. “What about my right to my child? What about that theft?”

She breaks down before her fifteen minutes are up and has to sit.

The law has little room for moral arguments.

After a short deliberation, the judges return with a verdict: guilty on all counts.

Sentencing is scheduled for 9 a.m. the next day.

Back in the jail, the two forgers are separated by stone walls and iron bars. Through the whispered relay of fellow prisoner Tom Fletcher, they communicate their fear, their love, their acceptance.

“We did good work,” Isaac tells her. “One hundred and twelve people are free. That is real.”

“I wish we’d had more time,” she replies. “A real life. Marriage. Children.”

“Me too,” he answers. “But what we had was beautiful.”

They go to sleep that night expecting the gallows.

They wake up to something stranger.

A Letter from the President

On May 5, 1863, the crowd outside the courthouse is larger than ever—close to 300 people jammed into the square and spilling into nearby streets.

Word has spread overnight about Isaac’s speech. Copies of Morrison’s pamphlet, The Paper Angel, have circulated among sympathetic whites and free Blacks. The case has jumped from local scandal to national symbol.

When Judge Peyton gavels the session to order, he does not immediately pronounce sentence.

Instead, he does something unusual: he reads letters.

Overnight, three appeals have reached the bench.

The first is from the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, signed by 43 members, calling Isaac and Hannah “representatives of the best of humanity” and warning that harsh punishment will be condemned by history.

The second is from the Richmond Inquirer, hardly an abolitionist paper, arguing that Isaac’s “extraordinary skill” should be exploited rather than destroyed—suggesting a domestic sale where his talents could be “properly supervised.”

The third is unlike anything a Confederate-leaning county court expects to see in 1863.

It is a communication from Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln has no legal authority in Confederate Virginia, and he knows it. But as President of the United States, he has political weight—and a telegraph line.

In a brief note dated May 4, he urges “consideration of clemency” for Isaac and Hannah, notes that the Emancipation Proclamation has already declared many enslaved people free in rebel areas, and warns that “harsh punishments for those who resisted bondage may be viewed unkindly by posterity.”

It is not a threat.

It is a reminder: the world is watching.

Peyton’s face is carefully controlled as he reads Lincoln’s signature.

Then he announces the original sentence the judges had agreed upon behind closed doors: death by hanging for Isaac; 50 lashes and sale to the Deep South for Hannah.

Murmurs ripple through the room, gasps, curses, cheers.

Then he uses a word no one expects:

“However…”

Virginia is at war. The Confederacy needs foreign recognition. The last thing its leaders want is a martyr whose story is already on pamphlet racks in Philadelphia.

“After due consideration of the broader interests of this Commonwealth,” Peyton says, “this court revises its sentence.”

Instead of execution or sale abroad to Cuban or Brazilian sugar plantations, Isaac and Hannah are to be granted conditional clemency.

They will be sold together to a single slaveholder outside Virginia but within Confederate territory, prohibited on pain of death from any further forgery.

It is still slavery.

It is still brutal.

It is also a crack in the system’s usual certainty.

An enslaved man has forced a Confederate court to consider public opinion, future history, and a letter from a president the judges do not recognize. His words, his “soldier” metaphor, his 112 ledgers entries have already altered the calculus.

Within a week, the sale is completed.

The buyer is a planter in Alabama named Thomas Grant, known—if such a word can be used in such a context—for comparatively “moderate” treatment of enslaved labor.

On May 10, 1863, chained together in the back of a wagon, Isaac and Hannah leave Virginia.

“We are not done,” Hannah tells him as the fields roll by. “We can’t make papers anymore. But there are other ways to fight.”

She is right.

The war Isaac spoke of has many fronts.

The forger will now become something else.

PART 4 – Legacy of a “Paper Angel”

Two years later, in 1865, the war ends.

The Confederacy collapses. The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery “except as punishment for crime.” Four million people walk out of bondage into a world that is formally free but profoundly hostile.

Among them are Isaac Coleman and Hannah Brown, now in their mid-thirties, older than their years and carrying scars that are not all visible.

They are released from an Alabama plantation where, against the odds, they managed to survive, avoid retribution for their past crimes, and continue their quiet resistance in other ways: teaching whispered letters in the quarters, passing news of Union advances, refusing to let the system break their minds.

They settle in Birmingham, a growing industrial town that offers work and relative anonymity. For the first time in their lives, they are legally allowed to do something simple and radical:

Choose their own names and sign them on a document that recognizes their humanity.

In 1866, in a small ceremony recorded in county books, they marry as “Isaac Coleman” and “Hannah Brown Coleman.”

The state of Alabama, which would have hanged them three years earlier for forgery, now recognizes their union.

Their bodies are too battered by slavery to give them children of their own.

So they do something else.

They foster dozens of orphans—Black children whose parents were killed in the war, lost in migration, or crushed by the violent backlash that follows Reconstruction.

Isaac finds work where he began: in print.

He becomes a printer in a Black-owned shop, then a partial owner, then a teacher of apprentices. The press that once printed slave sale advertisements now prints schoolbooks, church bulletins, political flyers.

He never forges another document.

He does, however, wield paper with surgical force.

He helps organize voter registration drives. He prints broadsides urging freedmen to claim their rights. He testifies before congressional committees investigating the abuses of slavery, drawing from his perfect memory to describe scenes that make northern legislators physically recoil.

In 1872, working closely with Eli Morrison, he publishes his memoir:

“112: The True Story of the Paper Angel.”

The book becomes a Northern bestseller, reprinted six times in English and translated into French and German. It offers one of the earliest, most detailed accounts of Underground Railroad practices from the perspective of an enslaved operator, not a white ally.

Hannah, who has spent years working as a midwife and community organizer, publishes her own account in 1878, focusing on the role of enslaved women in resistance—seamstresses who smuggle messages, cooks who poison, mothers who choose flight over surrender.

Together, they become quiet pillars of Birmingham’s Black community.

They also live long enough to watch Reconstruction betrayed.

They see federal troops pulled out of the South. They watch white supremacist “Redeemer” governments strip Black men of their voting rights through poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence. They read about lynchings in their own state.

They see slavery return in a new form through sharecropping and convict leasing.

Asked late in life if he is bitter, Isaac reportedly answers, “No. Angry, yes. But not bitter. Because the fight is not finished. It never is. Our part was one chapter. Others will write the next.”

He dies in 1903 at 71. Hannah follows in 1911 at 76. They are buried side by side in Birmingham’s Elmwood Cemetery, in a section permitted for Black burials.

Their shared headstone carries a simple inscription:

“We were soldiers in a war.
112 freed.”

For decades, the grave is a local secret—a place Black teachers and pastors visit to tell stories, a quiet pilgrimage site for those who know.

Then, in 1963, Birmingham explodes onto the front page of the nation’s papers.

Fire hoses and police dogs are turned on child protesters. Four young Black girls are killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Martin Luther King Jr. writes his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Amid that storm, civil rights organizers look backward for strength.

They find Isaac and Hannah.

Marchers begin visiting the Coleman grave before protests. King mentions Isaac by name in at least two speeches, according to contemporary press accounts, calling him “a prophet of freedom who understood that resistance is not only physical—it is intellectual, spiritual, and deeply moral.”

By the late 20th century, the story has fully entered public memory.

A statue goes up in Fauquier County: a bronze Isaac holding quill and paper, Hannah beside him, both looking north. A small museum in Birmingham dedicates a floor to their lives and to the broader history of document-based resistance—from forged freedom papers to fake travel passes used in later eras.

Schools and libraries across the U.S. are named for them.

But the most powerful memorial is not carved in stone or cast in bronze.

It lives in people.

The Descendants of 112 Decisions

Modern genealogical research estimates that the descendants of Isaac and Hannah’s “112” now number in the thousands: teachers, nurses, lawyers, artists, electricians, bus drivers.

Most have never heard of the “Paper Angel.” They know only that some ancestor somehow made it out of slavery and reached Ohio or Pennsylvania or New York.

A few families do know.

In oral histories collected in Ohio and western Pennsylvania in the mid-20th century, phrases recur:

“My great-grandmother always said a man in Virginia made her papers.”
“We were told a slave who fixed clocks changed our whole family’s life.”
“They called him the Paper Angel.”

One woman, interviewed in the 1980s, recalls a story passed down from her great-grandmother, who escaped Virginia as a teenager:

“She said the paper she carried was the most precious thing she ever owned. She slept with it under her dress. She said, ‘A man who never met me risked his life for me on that paper.’”

That is the heart of this story.

Not the cleverness of the seals. Not the courtroom drama or the presidential letter.

The essence is simple:

In a system built on ownership, one enslaved man and one enslaved woman quietly refused to accept the categories they were given. They took the very tools that defined them as property—documents, seals, signatures—and turned them into weapons for liberation.

They did not have guns or offices or legal standing.

They had quills, memory, and courage.

They used them to bend the trajectory of at least 100 lives.

The War Isaac Described Is Not Over

The institution of chattel slavery in the United States is dead on paper, abolished in 1865.

Its aftershocks are not.

They exist in the racial wealth gap that can be traced, family by family, to those who were paid for their labor and those who were not. They exist in redlined neighborhoods, in segregated schools, in policing and sentencing patterns that lock Black Americans into cycles of disadvantage.

They exist, too, in the way documentation still governs freedom: birth certificates, IDs, mortgages, voter registrations. Who gets to have their existence recognized on paper—and who doesn’t—remains a live question.

That is why Isaac Coleman’s story keeps resurfacing.

It is not simply an inspiring tale of a “good slave” helping others.

It is an indictment of a system so warped that one man with a pen could cost it $90,000 in “property” by doing nothing more than writing down a different version of the truth.

And it is a challenge.

Near the end of his life, asked what he wanted future generations to remember about him, Isaac gave an answer that pulled the focus away from his own legend.

“I want them to remember the 112,” he said. “Not me. Them. The ones who looked at a piece of paper and dared to walk away. I just gave them ink. They provided the courage.”

Yet history remembers both.

The 112 who took those steps into the unknown.

And the two people who made those steps possible.

The master forger and the seamstress.

The man the Richmond papers called “the Devil’s Forger.”

And the woman the enslaved remembered as the other half of the Paper Angel.

Their story is, in the end, not just about the past.

It leaves us with a question that cannot be answered by any archive:

In a world where chains look different—where they may be economic, legal, or social rather than iron—what are we willing to risk for someone else’s freedom?

Isaac would put it this way:

We are all soldiers in some kind of war.

He fought with quills and paper.

Today, the weapons might be votes, voices, organizing, teaching, exposing injustice, refusing to look away.

The Master Forger of Willowbrook Plantation did what he could with what he had, in the time and place he was given.

The rest is up to us.