Sara Lucy Bagby (c. 1843 – July 14, 1906) was the last person in the United States forced to return to slavery in the South under the Fugitive Slave Act.
Born in the early 1840s in Virginia, she was of African American heritage. She eventually escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad and made her way to Cleveland, Ohio, in a free state. In January 1861, she was pursued by her enslavers, William Goshorn and his son, and arrested by a U.S. Marshal.
Despite the attempts of both the Ohio state government and citizens of Cleveland to intervene—including a purported dramatic armed standoff in a courtroom, as well as defense from well-known abolitionist lawyer Rufus P. Spalding —she was transported back to Goshorn's property in Wheeling, then still part of Virginia. Regarding her capture, local Republican newspaper The Cleveland Leader, despite having abolitionist views, encouraged its readers to "obey the law for the sake of unity". This episode forms the subject of a poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, titled "To the Cleveland Union-Savers" (1861):
Following her capture, Bagby was sent to Fayetteville, Tennessee by Goshorn — who was planning to sell her to Cuba— and was subsequently freed by union forces led by Captain Vance.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, Bagby moved to Athens, Ohio and then to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, she married the Union soldier F. George Johnson. She and her husband resettled in Cleveland in the 1880s, where she received both honors and a standing ovation at a meeting of the Early Settlers Association held at Grays Armory in 1904. She would later die in 1906 after contracting sepsis from injuries she sustained from falling down a flight of stairs at her place of work. She was buried at the Woodland Cemetery with a headstone reading "Unfettered and Free".
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