The Fugitive Slaves Pipe: Anatomy of an Auction Record

The Fugitive Slaves Pipe is a fully carved meerschaum pipe signed F. J. Kaldenberg, depicting a woman and a man fleeing dogs. The name does not come from its own period; it was used in the catalog of an auction held in Virginia in February 2016.

The pipe is today held in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, registered under number 2016.166.37.1ab-.2. The piece is often cited both for the subject matter typical of carved meerschaum and for how the same object is described differently in two separate institutional texts.

The Object Itself

The museum record counts the pipe as New York-made and dates it to 1869-1889; the signature belongs to the workshop described in the Kaldenberg company entry. The body's material is sepiolite, the mineral name for meerschaum. The scene spreads around the chamber: the carved upper surface of the stump serves as the tobacco chamber, a woman runs past the stump looking back over her shoulder, and a man raises an axe over his head trying to fend off three dogs. With the mouthpiece, the total length is a little over nineteen centimeters. The pipe is preserved in a hinged wooden box painted black and shaped to its silhouette; the interior is lined with red velvet and satin, and the satin surface bears the maker's stamp. The museum record states plainly that the figures' faces are rendered as simian caricatures, and the institution separately notes that it collects objects carrying racist imagery in order to document the historical context in which they were produced.