MUSKEGON, Mich. — Consider Abraham Lincoln, John Brown and Frederick Douglass, leaders in America's long and bloody journey to emancipation. Consider this: Douglass believed an additional man deserved the same respect and reverence as the president and "other noble men."
The man's name: Captain Jonathan Walker, better known as The Man with the Branded Hand, a title earned for the pain he bore for the cause of freedom.
Walker is buried in Muskegon, marked by a weather-worn monument near the entrance of Evergreen Cemetery, a historic burial ground for other figures from the city's past, including Charles Hackley and Thomas Hume.
"I think a lot of people believe in a lot of good things, but it takes that step of courage to do something about it," said Jackie Huss, director of operations at the Lakeshore Museum Center.
Born in Cape Cod, Walker spent his working years "between the shipyard and the sea," according to the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 1835, he helped escaped slaves settle along the Mexican Coast, likely beginning his lifelong sympathy for the abolitionist cause.
"You had to expect that you might be caught and that there were going to be consequences," said Huss, who recorded a podcast on Walker in 2017.
In 1844, Walker attempted to sail seven slaves from Florida to freedom in the Bahamas. A $1,700 bounty on his head raised the stakes.
"He is a man of large frame, about six feet high with dark hair and dark complexion, a suspicious countenance, slouchy person, stooping shoulders and a swinging, rolling gait," claimed the warrant for his arrest.
Walker fell seriously ill and his ship — unable to be captained by an inexperienced crew — drifted aimlessly until it was rescued by a salvage sloop.
The rescue, though, soon turned into an arrest as Walker was charged with aiding and escaping slaves. Jailed in Key West and later extradited to Pensacola, he was chained in a cell with no bed while still suffering from sickness.
A federal court found Walker guilty, sentencing him to seven years in prison and an hour in a public pillory, which held Walker in a vulnerable position as a mob — including the owner of one of the formerly escaped slaves — pelted him with rotten eggs and curses.
"Look what we did to him; you don't want that to happen to you, so don't do it," said Huss, describing the purpose of such a punishment.
Then came the letters that would become a symbol of the abolitionist's legacy and the seeds of freedom he sought to sow: "SS," short for slave stealer, was branded on his right hand.
In his journal at the time, Walker detailed the incident: "It made a spattering noise, like a handful of salt in the fire, as the skin seared and gave way to the hot iron."
After spending a year in solitary confinement, Walker cut a deal for his release, paying a $600 fine with money from Northern abolitionists.
Prison, it seemed, only fueled his fire.
"If they're willing to do this to [Walker], what are they willing to do to the men who are enslaved and the women and children who are enslaved?" Huss said.
Walker toured the country upon his release, preaching an anti-slavery message. His branded hand, as one journalist at the time wrote, "was worth more to the Union than a whole army corps."
Shortly after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in the United States, Walker retired to a fruit farm in Lake Harbor (present day Norton Shores) in Muskegon County. His work was complete.
"His name deserves remembrance and should be mentioned along with those of John Brown ... Lincoln and other noble men," said Frederick Douglass at the time.
Walker died on April 30, 1878. A monument in his name was unveiled at Evergreen Cemetery later that year, paid for by abolitionist Photius Fisk and inscribed with a poem from John Greenleaf Whittier.
"That's a story right there," said Brooks Wheeler, the owner of Muskegon Monument and Stone.
More than 100 years after Walker's burial, Wheeler repaired and later helped replace a portion of the abolitionist's monument.
In the '90s, the master stone carver pinned and glued the tall top section back together after it was tipped off its foundation, vandalized. Later, a historian approached him with a plan for a new one: granite from Maine, cut in Georgia, carved by Wheeler in Michigan.
"I was questioning myself if I could do it," Wheeler said. "Never did a sculpted thing like that because that's not what people do nowadays."
He went to work, though, committed to the craft because "I do my stones as if I'm doing them for myself."
The final product, chiseled and cut to last "forever" has marked Walker's final resting place for decades now, as the poetic inscription still reads in part, "Then lift that manly right-hand, bold ploughman of the wave! Its branded palm shall prophesy, 'SALVATION TO THE SLAVE!'"
"I must have done an okay job," Wheeler said. "I'm good at copying, put it that way."
