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.

The Link to the Ansdell Painting

Both the sale description and the museum record tie the scene to English painter Richard Ansdell's (1815-1885) 1861 painting The Hunted Slaves. The painting was shown that same year at the Royal Academy exhibition in London, accompanied by lines drawn from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem about a fugitive slave taking refuge in a swamp; it is today held at the Walker Art Gallery, part of National Museums Liverpool, under number WAG 3070. The connection seems plausible at first glance, given the matching elements of the fleeing pair, the attacking dogs, and the raised axe. However, pipe literature notes that no contemporary document has been found tying the design to that source, and no period writing about the painting mentions such a pipe. Since the sources diverge on this point, the relationship is treated as an accepted attribution rather than a proven copy.

Catalog Description versus Museum Record

The pipe was, according to records, the only pipe lot in a sale of a Black American history collection assembled over many years and dispersed through Quinn's Auction Galleries in Falls Church, Virginia, and it closed, by the same records, well above the estimate range. As the accession number indicates, the piece entered the museum's collection that same year as a donation from the Liljenquist family. Set side by side, the two descriptions do not fully agree: the sale text describes the mouthpiece as amber, while the museum record gives the material as plastic; the catalog calls the box leather, while the museum describes it as wood painted black. The location of the painting also diverges in the same way: the sale text points to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, while National Museums Liverpool lists the work under the Walker Art Gallery in its own record; since both institutions fall under the same umbrella, this is more a difference in naming than a contradiction. Such discrepancies are exactly why an auction description should be treated as a starting point to verify rather than a final record; the subject is also discussed further in the pipe auctions entry.